Recently I purchased a new computer running Windows XP with Office 2007. My previous computer was primarily used for word processing and ran Windows 3.1. I saved all my Word documents on 1.44 MB floppy discs. To my dismay I now find that the new computer with Windows XP will not read these discs. Can you tell me if there is an easy, quick and hopefully cheap way to get the data to transfer from the discs to Windows XP?

There could be a few issues at play in this situation, which we will deal with sequentially. To begin, it is likely that your new computer does not have a floppy drive which will immediately prevent you from even loading and reading the floppy discs in your new computer. As such, we first need a method to physically read the discs. The easiest method for reading floppy discs on a computer without an in built-floppy drive is to purchase an external USB floppy drive. These plug into a USB port on the computer and then appear as a floppy disc drive within Windows, without the need for installation of any additional drivers or software (much like a USB thumb drive). You can then insert a floppy disc into the drive and read it just like any other drive. External floppy drives cost around $50 - $60 and are available from most computer retailers.

Once you have an external USB floppy drive you have overcome the first problem of being able to actually read the discs. The next issue is getting your computer to read the files on the discs. You mention that the files are Word documents. However, they would have been written in a very early version of Word (since you mentioned that your old computer was running Windows 3.1). That said, newer versions of Word should be backwards compatible and be able to read the documents, as the file format has not changed to a great degree (except with the introduction of a new file format in Word 2007) and, even so, Word does have the ability to read the file formats of earlier versions of Word files. However, I suggest that you copy the Word files to your local computer rather than attempt to read them directly off the floppy disc as it is likely to be more reliable and also quicker.

If you are unable to double-click to open the document files, open Word and go to the Office button and select “Open” to open your documents. Assuming that they open correctly, I suggest that you re-save the files in either Office 2003 (.doc) or Office 2007 (.docx) formats to ensure that they can be opened successfully again.