yountr01 wrote:
I entered disk utilities, found the device, but unsure of how to proceed in retrieving my files for my new computer
You don't need Disk Utility. You should be able to mount your disk on your desktop in Finder. See "Change what's displayed on your desktop" in
<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3737>
Once you check "External disks", you should see your disk on the desktop, and you should be able to copy your files to the desired location.
It would be nice to keep it as a convertible PC & MAC storage device.
If the disk if formatted in NTFS (default Win file system), Mac OS X can only read, but not write to it (unless you add additional software, which introduces additional complications).
To use the drive with both Macs and PCs, you need to re-format it either as FAT32 or exFAT. The former is the most compatible file system, but it does not support files >4GB; the latter is only supported on recent versions of Mac OS X and Win, and it's not supported on some Linux distributions. It's best to re-format it on a Mac; make sure the partition map type is MBR.
(Note that you could have transferred your data from PC to Mac over the LAN with Migration Assistant
<http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.7/en/mh35928.html>.)