Well, there is a IDE to USB adapter that will do the trick.
There is a product on, but the site seems to be taking very long to load.

Get yourself an enclosure and you can use your laptop hard drive like the new WD Passport external hard drives. There is a jumper on the hard drive so you may have to Google the hard drive model to find out the correct diagram for the jumper.

I did this for my desktop machine. Once I got all my info off the drive, I then reformatted it and placed everything back on except the OS. Now I have an external Media drive.

you may Repair your Windows Copy instead of installing another copy so that you still have your files.
this is acheived through inserting your Win CD then while restarting, boot from the CD then select repair be pressing the R button and go ahead
good luck

You can do it. You just need an adapter like this one

Yes and no, if your files are set to private when you first created the user account, taking it to another PC wont access them.

Yes you can get a converter, depend on the type of HDD, if its IDE, then you need a 2.5″ -> 3.5″ converter, if its SATA, then you just need the correct cable in teh desktop.

You can rescue the registry manually from one of the backup restore points, , but its not that simple, and you also need tools like ERD or some boot disk that allows NTFS reading/writing

You just can’t use a laptop hard drive on a Desktop.

For the HP, yes it is possible.

You need to hook the hard drive up as an auxillary. With this, you need a firewire cable to hook from one computer to the other.