Reading PFS First Choice and Word Perfect 5 files in an XP or Windows 98 environment

Question

My priest has 3 computers, Windows 3.1, Windows 98 and Windows XP. Recently his power supply blew out on his Windows 3.1 computer and he needs to get to the data on the hard drive. He's looking into imaging the hard drive and setting it up as a VM, which might be a bit much for him. Ignoring getting the data off the hard drive as a separate problem, are there any programs out there that can read files from PFS First Choice and Word Perfect 5. He already has Microsoft Office so solutions involving that are preferable. If he can install the software on his Windows XP or 98 computer, that would be helpful too. Thank you for your help

Answer 1

Microsoft Office can open Word Perfect documents so those aren't a problem, but it can't open PFS documents. The best you could do with Office is try to extract the text from the file, you'd loose all the formatting.

It may be possible to get Word Perfect and PFS running on Windows, I would guess that you would have better luck on Windows 98 instead of XP. It's probably worth a try.

Instead of full on virtualization which would work (I've made a Win 3.1 VM) you could try DOSBox which is an DOS emulator.

Answer 2

I believe that my grandfather was able to run PFS:First Choice on his XP box (bought after his DOS box blew up). I'd give it a try.