did you know that there are programs from Windows 95 which came out 28 years
ago that are still included with Windows 11 let's have a look at some of the more
surprising ones starting with phone dialer this does exactly what it says it
will dial a phone number for you it appears to be mostly unchanged since the
Windows 95 days right down to that very old school pixelated logo that appears
in the taskbar when you open it if you want to see it for yourself open up the
Run dialogue and then punch in dialer you'll get a simple interface with a
space to enter the number you want to call a key had if you'd rather just
click the digits one at a time for some masochistic reason and eight
programmable speed dial slots just like the landline phones of yester year of
course you'll need an actual phone modem in order for this functionality to work
but the good news is that these are still available for the Retro Computing
Enthusiast we all know one let's move on and talk about the character map this
one is still accessible under Windows tools in the start menu and probably
still has more practical usage than the old phone dialer the character map
actually goes back back all the way to the days of Windows 3.1 and serves the
same purpose now as it did then it displays all characters included in a
particular font and makes it easy to copy the one that you need to the
clipboard so if you need the trademark symbol or one of the Greek letters to
advertis your next sorority event or that sharp s that looks like the letter
B because you're typing something in German cuz they really
mad you could find it on the character map along with special alt codes for
some characters that allow you to type them in directly from the keyboard
Google's ability to quickly bring up a special character has made the character
map less relevant but it's still quite useful if you know what you're looking
for or if your internet connection is down but there's another app that Google
has also made a bit less relevant and we'll tell you what it is right after we
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wordpad which has also been around since Windows 95 has been a Mainstay because
for a long time it was hard to imagine operating system shipping without a word
processor in fact it replaced an older program called Microsoft WR that first
appeared in Windows 1.0 Microsoft has actually done a reasonable enough job
keeping up with the program the modern version resembles a simpler version of
Microsoft Word down to the neish ribbon
UI wordpad has more features than Windows other built-in text editor
notepad which made it very useful for folks that didn't want to Shell out
money for a standalone word processor but these days free Alternatives like
Google Docs offer features that wordpad doesn't such as spell check and
collaborative tools like comments perhaps this is why Microsoft decided in
late 2023 that it would no longer be included with new clean installations of
Windows 11 especially considering that a flaw in wordpad was targeted recently
byy malware but of course the more cynical take is that they'd rather not
give a rich text editor away for free when they can try and push people toward
Microsoft 365 subscriptions Perpetual money and here's
one more that you might actually still be using regularly if you have a
mechanical hard drive disc defragmenter
you can learn more about defragmentation in this video but the gist of it is that
it'll take any files that have become fragmented and put them into one
continuous space on your disc speeding up file access this is the big deal for
mechanical drives as file fragmentation can really hurt performance but
defragging ssds can wear them out prematurely because ssds aren't
mechanical there isn't a downside of a file being broken up into to
non-continuous chunks so instead modern Windows versions give you options for
optimizing your SSD by running the trim command which prepares blocks to have
new data written to them since Windows is supposed to do this automatically
every so often you might not ever touch the dis def fragmentor SL Drive
Optimizer program anymore which means there's a good chance you've heard its
feelings and it never forgets but there are other old school Windows features
that are still around so let us know if you're interested in a part two of this
trip down memory lane thanks for watching guys if you like this video hit like hit subscribe and maybe hit up that
video about storage and the defragmentation Glen it's a good one