Pearsall's Books

I used to use my room-mate's desktop computer until I got the shiny new laptop that I currently use. The problem I have been having is that I'd like to transfer the stuff that's on the hard drive on the old computer to my external hard drive but the USB ports on her computer don't seem to work at all. When I go into system and then device manager they don't show up at all. So, with Google having failed to provide any answers so far, does anyone know how I could go about doing this? Her computer doesn't have a cd burner (as it's pretty old), otherwise I'd use that to transfer everything (slow and tedious though that would be). Should I (or even can I) download USB port drivers onto this computer and then burn them onto cd to install on the old one? Or is there nothing to do and I should just remove the old hard drive and stick it on another desktop to do the transfer?