It's time to take an old Mac running OS8.6 to the old Mac's home. I need to transfer a lot of files to one of my XP-based PCs.

I really don't want to spend any additional $'s to upgrade the s/w or h/w of the Mac in order just transfer the files.
- Direct LAN transfers seem to be painful w/o getting OS10. Seems to be the equivalent of swinging a chicken over your head, doing the goat dance, praying to evil gods, etc...
- No CD burner in the Mac.
- only has usb 1.1.
- OS8.6 can read usb thumb drives - but can't write to them

I'm leaning toward archiving the files with Aladdin's Stuff-It, shipping the archive to a remailer and downloading to my PC. Problem is, what XP compatible freeware/shareware is out there that can un-stuff the archive?

Any ideas out there?

StuffIt can also make .zip files, and the windows version is capable of opening both .sit and .zip files (and it's free too, at least as a demo version).

If they're too big to email/upload, one option is to simply hook up the hard drive to your windows PC and purchase software called 'MacDrive' which allows Windows to read all mac-formatted disks (this assumes your old mac uses IDE drives, and it's not so old it still has SCSI drives). Should work with the drive whether it's plugged in internally, or via firewire/USB.

We think alike....I remembered I had stuff-it on my Mac. Downloaded the free Expander version for windows. Self extracting didn't work, but .sit did.

Time to do some file cleaning and transfer.

Even easier - load AIM on both platforms and use AIM's file transfer capability. Very fast!