OpenEuphoria

Re: [OT] doc files on XP

• Posted by Juergen Luethje <j.lue at gmx.de> Sep 03, 2006
• 521 views

Judith Evans wrote:

> I got a new computer Saturday. It is XP Pro and I'm used to Win98 so I'm still
> finding my way around. One very serious problem I have are files
> created with WordPad in win98 and saved as filetype .doc. When I try to open
> these files in XP it thinks I want to open a Microsoft Word 6.0 document
> in Wordpad and stops me! I looked in FolderTypes and it says for DOC
> filetypes to open with WordPad. I've tried to rename the doc files to
> .rtf or .txt and that loads them but they are unreadable. I've also
> tried starting WordPad and opening the .doc file but, of course, it
> also presents the same error message.

I believe the "Wordpad" program that ships with Win XP is different from
the one that ships with Win 98, and maybe they use different file formats.

> I didn't let the guy that built the XP rob
> my win98 for parts so I could use the win98 to open the files and convert to
> .rtf or .txt but I have 287 files and will take awhile. This will be a problem
> anyway since I often get .doc files (which are not M$ Word)in zip files and
> they would need to be transferred to the win98, converted and replaced
> on the XP. The win98 is starting to fail so that is not much of an
> option. There must be an easier way.
> 
> Has anyone run into this when upgrading and how did you solve the problem?

Try to copy the Win 98 Wordpad program to your new XP machine. If the
old program runs on the new machine, opening the files with the old
program is the easiest solution that I currently can think of. To avoid
naming conflicts with the original Win XP Wordpad, it's probably best to
rename the old program to say Wordpad98 or so.

Regards,
   Juergen


PS: For this and other reasons, I always recommend not to use proprietary
    file formats, but to use formats such as RTF, whenever possible.