Recovering Data Via SATA USB Wire?

After 5 years of use, my college laptop (Windows Vista) finally gave up on me a couple of months ago. Each time at start up, it would automatically go to the blue screen of death and never get past that point. I wound up getting a new laptop (ASUS S500CA) operating on windows 8, and now I'm attempting to recover some of my files from the old hard drive. After a little reading, I discovered that you can pull the old drive, connect it to another computer via a USB cable, and attempt to recover the data on the drive. So I ran down to the local best buy and picked up an Apricorn SATA Wire. Here's the problem. Every time I hook the hard drive up to the computer via the USB wire, my computer instantly goes to a blue screen and goes into a cycle of restarting itself over and over. Does this mean that my old hard drive is just too far gone to recover, or is there another method that I can try?