An elderly couple asked if I could recover some games that they lost from their computer… They asked if I could handle a “really old” computer.

I said sure!

When I got there, I find they were running windows for workgroups 3.11. Now that brings back memories from the early 1990’s 🙂

I suppose they could have been running MSDOS!

Well, it turns out they had misplaced one of the shortcut icons, and deleted a few others. Easily fixed.

Anyway, it was good fun to refresh my old skills. Its amazing… many tasks that we can do in an instant using win xp or win9x, were much more cumbersome back in the wfw3.11 days.

As an example:

I also have a cd with some simple windows games, so I thought I’d use the time I had left to install a few extra games…

I copy the games from the CD to a games folder I created on the c: drive. Partway through the copy, c: fills up.

Ok, I try deleting all the new files I created… but they are all read-only, and windows prompts me for every single file… and still doesn’t delete them… So I try to do a bulk change of properties (to remove the read-only flag)… but I cannot do it if I select a folder… so I have to work on each folder contents, individually… time consuming, but I finally manage to free up some space, and to install some new games for them.

I also tell them about windows ’95’ and how wonderfully easy it is, to use 🙂

They are now considering getting a ‘used’ computer from me. Since the have no interest in the internet (and it would confuse the **** out of them), I’d say a cheap ($250 (or even a cheaper $150) P3 system with win98 will be more than enough for them.