Taking old computers to the municipal tip ...

[Workingman]

John - Sticking with drive G:

You might not be doing anything wrong.

You say that you can see it and its folders and files from (My) Computer on your laptop.

Can you manually navigate to the folder where your correspondence is kept on drive G:?

If so what are its properties - from the right click menu?

Can you copy the whole folder and paste it to drive C: on the laptop?

If so what is now in it?

[Aggers]

Thanks. Frank.

I have finally managed to get the correspondence files. etc. transferred from my old
HD to my laptop. When I click on 'Documents' their titles appear on the screen, together
with those of recent documents already on my laptop.

However, when I click on one on the transferred items, this message appears:

What do you want to do with if -
Open (file won't be saved automatically)
Save
Save as

If I click on 'Open' a list of downloads appears, including the one I want.

Clicking on the download doesn't do anything.

Now what should I do ?

[Workingman]

Still sticking with drive G: the old hard drive. Forget those you transferred for the moment.

You say that you have located the files that you want on the G: drive. If you try to open one of those files from its location on drive G: what happens? The reason I am asking is because of their file extensions; it would be nice to know what they are and what programme you are trying to open them with.

I seem to remember that you used to have MicroSoft Office and now use OpenOffice.... There might be a conflict.

[Aggers]

Frank - I have tried to access my files from the G file (my old HD) but get the message... "Adobe Reader could not open file
because it is either not a supported file type or because the file has been damaged, for instance, sent as an email attachment
and not correctly decoded'.

I have no compatability problems with Microsoft Word and Open Office - I regularly use both.

I don't understand what you mean by file attachments.

I don't know what I open them with, I just click on them.

[Workingman]

If you right click on one of your files on drive G: a new menu pops up. Go to Open with, then Choose default program. In the new screen untick Always use the selected program... then hit the Browse button and navigate to OpenOffice to get the correct modules .exe Writer for Word docs or Calc for Excel spreadsheets. You file on G: should now open.

[Aggers]

Thanks, Frank.

For two days now I have been working away on this but haven't got very far.

I tried what you said, and tried the 'open by' options but there were not many options given and they didn't work, and when I put in 'Open Office' it came up with my documents and pictures converted into gobble-de-goup, most of the letters being 'y'. (yyxyyyyyyy yy yyyyyjy).

I then tried the internet option given, to find a suitable loader, and came up with 'Open Freely'. This worked OK with a photograph but documents produced the message 'Not a valid Win32 Application' whatever that means.

I'd like to suceed, but I'm stuck now.

[Workingman]

John,

Your pictures will be .jpg (jpeg) and will need Paint, or similar, to open them.

The documents will be either: Word/Works/Text for letters or Excel for spreadsheets.

Try this: open OpenOffice Writer. Choose File>>>Open... then in the new screen navigate to your files on drive G:\
In the drop down to the right of File name at the bottom of the screen you will find a comprehensive list of file extensions, the default is All files *.*

Clicking through each one will show you files you can open. I would go for Text Documents and then Spreadsheets to start.

[Workingman]

An update.

John's files were with the .wps extension as used by Microsoft Works. Depending on the version they can be opened by Microsoft Word providing a converter is obtained from the MS download centre. However, if you do not have Word or MS Office you are snookered... unless you get this, LibreOffice, from here: http://www.libreoffice.org/#0 it's free.

It is a version of OpenOffice, but without the restrictions, and it will open just about anything.

There are other solutions, but they either cost a lot or are so long winded as to be impractical for more than a few files.

For those of you who are using Works you can avoid this problem by choosing 'Save As' when saving a file and opting for a Word/Excel/Powerpoint version rather than accepting the default.