Transfer files from Windows 7 to mac only formatted external hard drive

[brettallica]

This is a very common situation. I think your best bet, if you want something super-easy and quick, is to invest in something like MacDrive if the files are that important and are already on your external drive. MacDrive has a free trial, too.

Obviously, if you have networking capabilities and can hook up your external drive and turn it into a share over the network, that would be pretty easy as well (this is still assuming that you have files on your external). You need more things to get that to work, though, and it takes a little more savvy.

If all you're doing is moving/copying files from a Windows 7 system to a Mac, then that's really easy. If you've got a decent network setup, this process will actually be quite painless to get the files from one computer to the other, and you won't even need an external drive. All you need to do in this case is share the folder(s) whose files you want to transfer to your Mini, and then be sure to set the permissions/security for others to access that/those folder(s). Pretty easy, really.