Hypothetical situation... Say you need to transfer around 50MB of data from a computer with windows 3.1 to a modern computer with OS windows XP... how would you do this?? YOu have a $50 budget... No network card. No internet connectivity... mitch

Put the Win31 HDD in the XP machine as primary slave or as secondary slave or master. Budget for one (1) screwdriver I'm just looking for clues at the scene of the crime

Spend $2.40 on 40 floppies: http://www.bgmicro.com Download Winzip: http://www.winzip.com (32-bit) http://www.oldversion.com (16-bit) Do "spanned-compression" across the disks. Spend about a hour and a half. Pocket $47.60 (but then again, I'm a cheapskate)...

2 cheap 10Mb NIC's - $15 short crossover cable - $5-10 Then just install the TCP/IP driver for WFWG and configure the stuff, etc.

If it is Win31 (as posted) and not WfW then networking will have to be done by means of DOS drivers on the Win3x end I'm just looking for clues at the scene of the crime

yes, its better in the long run to use NIC's and a crossover cable... any computer store should have an old ISA NIC (i asume that the 3.1 machine has only ISA bus) you can download the nessesary DOS drivers from http://www.wown.info/j_helmig/win31.htm install as instructed then create a share folder on the XP machine and copy over the files

You could find an old parallel port 100mb zip drive. There pretty cheap now adays. 100mb zip disc's are cheap too i'm 99% sure you could find one and get a dozen disc's for less than $50! Then to copy to the hard drive of the xp machine should be a snap, plug in the cord and parallel cable make sure it's turned on and xp should recognize it. then copy files. plus it will work on multiple computers even if they don't have cd roms, burners, or even usb.