January 16, 2008
Hi, All!
This Week: More readers' Questions:
Re-Fitting Old drives & MS FREE Downloads
Is it possible to remove the "floppy" and the "cd/cdrw" drives from "Dinosaur Dell" and use them as external drives hooking up to the laptop I use? In place of a "floppy drive" the owner opted for a wireless card slot when this was made. If I can, especially the floppy drive, would I have to convert it to a USB connect? Plug directly to motherboard? Or ????? Both of these drives are fairly new (in Dell) and before I dump the whole thing-I thought about salvaging these two components. The Dell is huge; one could park a jet inside without crowding!!!! Otherwise-I would consider upgrading. Don't have room.
I was not able to find any USB enclosures for CD or Floppy drives. The enclosures I found are all for hard drives, and they are too small for a floppy or CD drive. I looked at my favorite supplier, www.Tigerdirect.com, plus a search on the web. I could not come up with anything. There would be no way to plug it into the laptop motherboard. Like on a desktop, everything is wired-in on laptops.
Next question-went to MS to check on updates for laptop and got into "Office" templates. My question is: Are all these free to download? Some downloads are old; some new. I noticed that even on standard sized 30-to-a-page address labels, only few designed ones said "Word 2007" or "Publisher 2007". Does this mean it won't work on a 2003 program of the same?
All downloads (so far) on Microsoft's web site are free, and yes, you have to make sure what you download is for the versions of Office and Windows that you have installed. You can download any, but they will not install if the versions don't match.
'Til next week,
(ComputerFAQ#376)
Robert
Please send your questions to
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