want to sell off my old college computer, but want to get my documents off of it first.

most in either write or lotusworks.... thought about printing hard copies of each, but my epson color stylus 200 keeps giving me a spooler error, and then the computer says it's out of memory. is this printer just too much for my little old computer?

would i just be better off putting everything onto floppys and trying to open them in my current computer?? will the lotus documents open in word? or excell? or will i be able to to open them in some other programs???

thanks,
al

You can put a bunch of docs on a 1.44 floppy.

If you're really brave you can use msbackup but it's pretty unreliable and you would need the same OS to restore them.

I'd make a list of the directories and files you want to save and just copy them to new floppies. The list will help you organize and determine how many floppies you need.

Skip

skip:

if you're using windows 3.1&up, you can install winzip and zip the docs into one or a few larger files (but smaller than 1.44MB); that way it won't take as many floppies to copy them to another computer.

386dude

Hi AGUINN:
If you have lots of data you could try to remove hard drive & set dip pin(s) to work as slave. Install into newer PC as slave & copy to master hard drive. Another thing is buy two removable hard drive trays & use old hard drive for old programs & OS, make sure you re-install Win 3.1. Only thing is you'll can only get 256 colors (max) in SVGA using SVGA.exe driver because new video card won't have 3.1 drivers. Don't think you can get anything for old 386, better to save hard drive.

Removable hard drive trays, should work with older drives. If you have a new PC where the bios auto configures the hard drives, just change drives & boot. If older you might have to change hard drive bios settings when changing drives to work, here's a link to show you removable tray.
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=GN210-BLK

Good luck.
Z

Or you could use laplink to link the 2 together and transfer files that way. I have used 720k floppies to transfer dos 6.22 and win3.11 to Amiga pc emulator from my 486 laptop and its a pain and VERY VERY boring. Now i have laplink I just need the cable . . . . but then the Emulator hardfile is backed up anyway, I have 3 one for win3.0, one for 3.1 and one for 3.11 plus the backups. now id transfer it to my pc and burn it to cd

Woof

z is right just open up your 386 and unplug the hard drive now look for a sticker your any thing that tells you what the jumper settings are, once you find this set it to slave (should be set to master when taken out of 386)now open up your current computer and look at the cable connecting your hard drive the mother board or hard drive control card, if it has a cd attatched unplug the cd for now and plug in the hard drive from your 386 now you may have to set some things in the bios i'm not sure but when its all setup just copy all your files to your current computer and when your done just take the hard drive out and put it back in your 386 but remember to change the jumper back to master, and your done, hope it works!