I bought my wife a new computer for Christmas. I'm looking for an easy way to transfer the files on her old computer to the new one. I was going to just use a thumb drive to do it. She says she heard that all you have to do is connect a network cable between the two and copy from one to the other. Is it really that easy? If not, then how could I do it?

Both computers are using XP, if that matters.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Maybe. I tried that one time and he computers recognized each other briefly then stopped talking to each other so I brought the cable back. It's certainly worth a try. I borrowed an external hard drive form a guy at work a couple weeks ago when I bought this new machine. Depending on the size of the thumb drive and and the amount of storage, it could be one transfer or multiple transfers.
Don't forget to go onto the C drive and into your mail and internet programs to retrieve you favorites/bookmarks and e-mail address book.

thumb drive is a good choice to copy and transfer all your files. Depending on the capacity of the thumb drive and the amount of files that need to be transfer and the USB type (2.0 and above), transfer will be fast..
Network cable can be used but the speed is slower than using thumb drive. and it's not that easy. After connecting the network cable from the old pc to the new pc, you have to configure the address and IP so that both and recognise each other in other for them to share files.
You can get serial cable as well but it also need to be configured.

Best choice is an external storage like that of thumb drive or an external hard disk.
This is faster that using a network cable ....
but the fastest way to do this (this is my method) is to use another hard disk (i always have 2 hard disk in my pc) and connect to the IDE controller like they nomally do... this will create another drive. The only thing to do is to set proper HD jumper setting (for master and slave) and setup the pc to detect both the IDE drive.... this the fastest way for me but you have to open the PC casing and plug in the IDE cable and power cable to the extra hard disk..

Merry Christmasss

Another thing you can do (if you’re comfortable with opening the computer and changing components) is to take the hard drive out of your old computer, set the jumper (little pins on the back) on the back to SLAVE mode and connect it to the new computer and get your files that way. Make sure that you connect the slave (old hard drive) to the connector in the middle of the IDE (ribbon) cable. The cable is usually labeled Master, Slave, and IDE to show where everything goes. I just got a 200 GB hard drive for my computer and that’s what I had to do to get my pics and music.

I would do one of 2 things:
Leave it alone, it will keep your missus quite for ages trying to work out how to do it and if she loses all the info you cant be blamed.

Take them to a computer shop and ask them to do it