Darktemper, Missing_KSKD, Andrew2 and any other computer experts…you guys seem to be quite knowledgeable about these things (which I’m not)…maybe you could help with this before I head to my local Radio Shack. I’d sure appreciate it.

Yesterday I bought a used system for my sons from an acquaintance, and to sweeten the deal, he threw in a Dell Latitude CPi A-series laptop which he only used for gaming and watching movies. It runs Windows 98 Second Edition.

I’ve been wanting a basic laptop just so that I can write while away from my home office. The Latitude’s word processor runs something called OpenOffice 1.1.0…I played with it for a while today, and it seems to be a step between Microsoft Works and Word, but should work well enough for my purposes. Except for one thing…uploading the documents to my Dell Dimension 2400 desktop.

My USB flash drive isn’t compatible (as far as I can tell) with the Latitude. Any ideas on how to upload documents from the outdated software in the laptop to the less outdated Office 2000 in the desktop? The guy I bought it from is on vacation for the next week, so I can’t ask him.

If the solution is something so simple as using a USB to USB patch cord, I’ll crawl into a corner and wilt away out of sheer embarrassment.

Openoffice is a freeware program, designed to replace MS word.

If the laptop has e-mail capability, mail the file to yourself.

You can probably find drivers to get the usb drive to work, its probably got the old USB 1, so if you can find an old usb drive that would work.

Lastly, if you have a home network, put it on your network and share the drive.

Open Office is good stuff - free software, and the version you have must be years newer than Office 2000. You can download the much newer Open Office 2.0 from www.openoffice.org and that would surely be newer - but not sure how well it would work on a Win98 machine.

One thing: make sure you save Open Office docs in MS Office format (.doc), not OO's native format, which can't be read by MS Office. You can even set the default open and save formats to be .doc so you never have to worry about it.

As Nwokie said, you can likely find drivers for your flash drive manufacturer's website. If you want, you can invest about $15 in a USB 2.0 (much faster) PC Card (PCMCIA) card for this laptop, so you can use faster USB devices. It would probably speed up your flash drive just a tad, though.

As a project, you might consider upgrading this machine to Windows 2000. Windows 98 is really awful and is also poorly supported now for most everything. Having at least 256MB of RAM would help a lot, too. I know it's just a "cheapy" laptop but it's something to consider, if you can come upon a cheap Windows 2000 CD with a valid key for example.

Andrew

I hate openoffice, from a corporate point of view, we have a few engineers that refuse to use MS products, and getting the documents they produce to work when wesend it corporate is a real pain!

It is most likely a driver issue for the thumb drive. Go to the manufacturers site and see if it is compatible with that OS. If it is they should have drivers for Win98. If not then there are still a few thumb drives on the market which do. I'm sure if you plug it in and look in your device manager you will see an unknown device listed there, that would be the thumb drive. Something to cinsider is to purchase a win2000 upgrade disk off of Ebay and upgrade that old laptop to Win2000. It is more stable than Win98 and not the memory hog that XP is. Win2000 is also more plug and play friendly with USB components.

See example:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Windows-2000-Pro-Upgrade-with-FREE-Dell-GX1-Computer_W0QQite mZ250156883799QQihZ015QQcategoryZ41885QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
You even get a POS PC to go with it as this is OEM software and must be sold with a computer....although gauranteed not to work.

Have Fun

Thank you all so much for the suggestions! Thank you for taking time to respond. I'll be on those suggestions tomorrow (have to be up at 4 am mountain time, so I'm not far from bedtime...I better spend some time with the family).

Thank you all so much for the suggestions! Thank you for taking time to respond. I'll be on those suggestions tomorrow (have to be up at 4 am mountain time, so I'm not far from bedtime...I better spend some time with the family). Oops, my "pooter is off an hour, it's actually 7:43 my time.

(N)ot sure how well (OpenOffice) would work on a Win98 machine.
Doesn't work too well... slow to load, slow to open anything... slow to keyboard responses... I use Abiword (another free word processor), and a relic from the past called Sphygmic Software SpreadSheet (only supports the old 8x3 file names!).
They work for me, which is why I use them.