Moving wordpad documents

[Hokie60]

I have an old computer running Windows95 which has a lot of documents written
with wordpad. I want to move them to a new computer running Windows Vista. I
tried copying them to a disc and loading them into Documents but now they are
unreadable garbage. Any suggestions????

 

[Cameron Snyder]

In what format are they saved under 95? What file extension do they have?
Try saving them in another format--rich text format (save as) and then re-do
your copy. And you are opening them in Vista WordPad, right? Not Notepad.

 

[Hokie60]

They are saved as .doc extension in 95 and "yes" I am using Vista Wordpad.
What extension should I use? Thanks for the help as I am a rookie at this.

 

[John]

If you open WP in Vista and go File-Open, look in the lower right, to the
right of File Name... see File Format?
Click the drop-down arrow in File Format to see what formats WP supports. If
there's not any major formatting, take the 95 .doc files and save them as
RTF files in 95. Or save them as .txt files. Then Vista WP should be able to
read them.

If you have many .doc files, see if there are file format converters for
Vista WP that support your 95 WP format.

 

[Hokie60]

I ran a test on both suggestions. .txt files were still garbage but changing
them to RTF files worked like a charm. I have now moved all my documents to
Vista. Thanks a million for the help.