(emphasis mine) Do you mean, to your portable external USB hard drive? Drag and drop?
OK! Piece o' cake. I just did that very recently, since I received my new Dell laptop on Tuesday.
The way I handled it, was to make a folder on my portable external USB hard drive for files to be transferred. Then I copied my folders of photos, documents, and other files into it by drag and drop. You can do this now, before you even buy your new computer, at your leisure. Leave things in their original folders, using enough folder structure that you will know where they belong. DON'T FORGET TO COPY YOUR INTERNET EXPLORER FAVORITES FILE to this folder too. Also don't forget anything you might need from your desktop.
When you are ready to transfer files to your new computer, drag the folder from the portable hard drive to your new computer's desktop. Transferring so much will take time, so do it right before cooking dinner, or at bedtime, or when you have something else to do.
Piece o' cake! Now just put the photos, documents, and other data where you want it.
As for programs, I didn't copy them over. I downloaded freeware (like malwarebytes, open office, ccleaner, etc). Then I installed some more software from disks.
Doing all this was really fast. By the end of just one evening I had finished and had restored the original system configuration on my old computer so that it was ready to gift.
Now dealing with Dell's B*** was a lot more time consuming, so, setting up the computer so that it was ready for files to be transferred was more annoying than it had to be IMO.