I’ve got an ancient Compaq Armada M300 laptop that I’ve brought back from the dead to recover some long-lost Word files. The laptop has a USB port and the ‘docking-station’ thingy has floppy and CD drives but none of these drives ‘shows-up’ on ‘my computer’ (or anywhere else for that matter) but they did work back in the distant past and nobody has ‘fiddled’ with the thing since then.
Any ideas how I can export the files off the laptop? :confused:
While I’m not computer-illiterate I am a bit computer ‘slow-reader’ so it would be appreciated if any help had more words than numbers!
By: Creaking Door - 9th April 2008 at 00:51
“There is no native (supplied by Microsoft) support for USB in Windows NT!” – Wikipedia.
Well I didn’t know that…..and would explain why I couldn’t get the USB ports to work! 😮
Shows how long since I’ve used NT…..however, Wikipedia also had a useful link to a USB driver for NT (nice one!) which I burned onto a CD, all 5MB of it!
I then loaded the USB driver onto the laptop via the docking-station CD drive (which is working but cannot write to a CD so didn’t help me) and hey-presto…
…the USB port is working! 🙂
Problem solved…..data transferred…..it only took me about three hours…..still, better than watching TV!
Thanks for all the suggestions.
By: Creaking Door - 8th April 2008 at 19:49
I’ve borrowed an LPT cable from work…..well I think it is an LPT cable (25 pins male-to-male), so I’ll try that later.
The laptop is running Windows NT but I’ve tried the USB memory stick route and the laptop refuses to ‘detect’ the memory stick (or any other drive for that matter) my thinking was that this is a ‘driver’ issue but the other drives used to work so what has gone wrong?
The laptop also has a modem.
By: Pondskater - 8th April 2008 at 19:00
Yep, that old LPT cable thing should work.
If the USB port is working and you have a USB memory stick/flash drive, you could put that in. You would need to be running Windows XP or at the very least Windows 98 2nd Attempt but with 98 you would need a software driver for the memory stick/flash drive thing which is probably going to create more trouble if you haven’t got a drive to load it in from.
Or – a bit off the wall – but can you get a modem to connect to it and e-mail the files to yourself?
Allan
By: Arabella-Cox - 8th April 2008 at 00:49
You can still go the old way and use an LPT cable between two laptops..
After that you only need to establish parallel connection between these two. I normally do it in Total Commander [click on ‘Network’ and then on ‘Establish PORT connection to another PC’], set the coimputer you will be working on as client and the other one as server. It’s slow but works.
Flex
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April 7, 2008 at 10:24 pm