Internal/External hard drives question

Yes you can see the files on the hard disk. However, unless you place another hard drive into your system, install the OS into that new drive, or set up your computer's BIOS to boot via USB through your external drive, your computer won't be able to load Windows properly.

The way I read your question, you want to take the internal drive from Computer #1 out and mount it in an enclosure so you can hook it up to Computer #2 and read the files. You don't care that Computer #1 is now useless with no hard drive in it to provide an Operating System.

Yes this will work just fine. You will not be able to use the external drive to boot into Vista on Computer #2 - it will continue to boot into Win 7 form its own internal drive - but that is what you want, anyway.

Lol, I'll get another hard drive for the first computer and use a program that pretty much replicates the old hard drive (Acronis migrate)

I wanna use the old hard drive to pretty much use Microsoft office files on there (I got lots of important ones in there, so ill keep the hard drive instead of copy/pasting everything) and copy/paste games and other stuff.

The only issue you might have is if you're trying to access personal files in the "My Documents" folder. These normally have Security ACLs (Access Control Lists) which restrict access to the account that owns the files.

If you attach the disk to a different Windows system, such files will be blocked from access even though the disk is capable of being recognized and read. This will be true even if the accounts on the new system have the same names as those on the old system (because the internal security identifiers differ between systems). The solution is to either:

a) change the security settings to give "Everyone" full access to the files and folders before you remove the drive from the old system, or

b) sign on to an administrative account on the new system, take ownership of the files and folders, and then change the security settings on them. The "take ownership" part is important - even an administrator can't change the security settings of someone else's files unless the permissions allow it.