Mac Forum / Applications / Word / March 2006

Hi Charlotte -

I've been watching this thread but haven't jumped in as you were in
excellent hands, but your question on LaCie drives was irresistible.

Let me first qualify what I am posting because you don't specify what type
of 'drive' you mean - LaCie makes Hard drives, CD drives DVD drives, USB
Keys  (often referred to as flash or thumb drives), etc. I've used a number
of their products over the years & have never had anything but excellent
performance & results. As with any mfr, I'm sure they have had their share
of faulty product, but overall they have a good reputation.

I can't remember seeing the post you mentioned, but it may have been from
someone who was essentially 'shooting the messenger'. Another possibility is
that the poster had been trying to save to or open files directly from a CD
or USB flash drive, which is almost certain to cause file damage regardless
of *what* brand it is.

Regards |:>)

On 3/29/06 5:17 PM, in article
1143670650.146791.11100@z34g2000cwc.googlegroups.com, "Charlotte L."
<decaftalllatte5@yahoo.com> wrote:

Hi Charlotte:

Naaaahhhh :-)  I open Word documents all the time on external drives.  The
only one you need to avoid is a floppy drive, and those are not "that"
common on Macs any more :-)  Floppy drives have problems running out of
space and dropping "chunks" of files.  A Word document won't stand that: you
must either read it all, or you can't read any of it.

External drives on older versions of Mac OS had problems if they were
designed for PCs and forgot that a Mac file is in two parts: the Resource
Fork and the Data Fork.  But I've never seen the problem on OS X.

However, those files are NOT corrupt :-)  They're in an old Word format that
is no longer available.  It's the old text-based Word for DOS format known
as "Word.Document.2".  You send 'em to me and I'll have them open in a New
York minute for you.

All converters are programs: fairly large and quite active.  They make good
targets for virus writers and are difficult to secure against that.

Microsoft made a decision some years back to drop support for that converter
because it required too much work to maintain it, and nobody used it any
longer.

It shipped with everything up to Mac Word 6 and PC Word 97, if I recall.  In
Word 97/98 Microsoft adopted the new Word.Document.8 format, which is what
everything is using now.

Because Microsoft updated their Word 2 converter for Windows 95/Word 97, it
still works on latest version of Windows.  Windows XP still runs code
designed for earlier versions of Windows (actually, Windows XP will run code
designed for MS DOS!!  There are still idiots out there who believe that
this "proves" that Windows XP is built on DOS.  It's not -- it's nothing
like it -- it's a very clever emulation, much like Classic or Rosetta).

However, the old Word 2 converter for Mac OS will NOT run on Mac OS X.
Microsoft found it would cost too much to get the Mac version of that
converter running reliably on OS X, so they dropped it.  They've dropped it
on the PC too, but the old version still works there.

That's your only problem: the old converter won't run on the latest Mac OS.
It will run on the latest Windows :-)

I see Microsoft has now put its foot down and withdrawn said converter from
its download site (not surprising: it has a minor security hole in it that
they don't want to spend huge amounts of money rewriting to patch).
However, it's all over the net.  I found it here:
http://wadict.soas.ac.uk/download/convpack.exe

If you have a friend with Windows Office 97 or later, download that file and
run it to add the old Word converters to PC Word.  They'll work just fine

Cheers

On 30/3/06 8:17 AM, in article
1143670650.146791.11100@z34g2000cwc.googlegroups.com, "Charlotte L."
<decaftalllatte5@yahoo.com> wrote: