Odd question about putting word 5.5 on old notebook computer

[Don]

Hello from Medicine Hat.

The other day I found an old Toshiba T1200XE notebook
computer. The operating system is MS DOS 4.01,
apparently. It only has about 20 megs of space on the
hard drive and this particular machine currently has wp
5.1 installed. I want to remove the WP and install a
word program and have been told I should use Word 5.5.
Using a Word program will permit me to transfer work
between it and my modern desktop computer which uses
Word '97. This plan is all theory because I have no
manual for the machine and don't know anything much about
DOS, other than it should be capitalized. Really I don't
know what I'm doing at all, but I'm a writer and I like
to stare at the Toshiba machine's blue screen. (I'm only
going to use it for writing when I sit in my armchair.)
If anyone knows where I can get an inexpensive copy of
word 5.5 and/or find a bit of information on dos 4.01,
and/or can give me any advice concerning this silly
project, I would appreciate it very much. So far I've
been able to get the system to boot up and I've found the
DOS help menu (by typing "help" on the screen) and I've
been able to open the wp 51 program. And that's it.

Regards to all and thanks in advance. Don.

 

[Shauna Kelly]

Hi Don

If you can't find Word 5.5, you can still use use WordPerfect 5.1. WP 5.1
was as a good a word processor as was made in its time, it's stable, it will
do the job for you. (I still miss some functionality that was available in
WP 5.1 that still isn't available in Word 2003!). Best of all, you already
have it up and running.

Assuming that both the Toshiba and your machine at work both have a floppy
disk drive, you can copy a WP document from the hard drive to a floppy disk.
You will then be able to copy the file from the floppy to your hard drive at
work, and open the WordPerfect file in Word 97. In Word 97, just do File >
Open and open it in the ordinary way. Word 97 has converters that will open
the file in Word, and for straight-forward text, they're fine. For complex
formatting, however, they don't always work 100% perfectly, as the following
article describes:

WordPerfect to Word converters (and why none of them are perfect)

http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/General/WordPerfectConverters.htm



However, no matter what you end up using, just make sure you don't save to a
floppy drive, or open from a floppy drive directly. Copy to and from the
hard drive, and work on the file only on the hard drive. WP will be more
forgiving, but Word 97 will, sooner or later, corrupt the document.


Hope this helps.

Shauna Kelly. Microsoft MVP.
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word

 

[Guest]

Many thanks Shauna. It worked! You've solved my problem.
Just have to get used to WP 5.1 and I'm away.
Cheers Don