Tranfer photos & files from one computer to another

External drives can bite you as easily as internal drives. Several years ago I bought a 500GB external drive and used it to hold a lot of photographs, music libraries, and old documents. It worked great for about 3 years, then one day when I booted up my laptop, the light on the external drive just kept flashing, like it was starting up, but it never came online. I cannot get ANY computer to boot that hard drive now - it's sitting on my desk waiting for me to get enough ambition to try and get all those files off of it - it's not a complete loss because I also have most of the files on my laptop, and on some flash drives, but it is annoying...