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Did you know that there are programs from Windows 95, which came out 28 years ago,

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that are still included with Windows 11? Let's have a look at some of the more

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surprising ones, starting with phone dialer. This does exactly what it says it will,

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dial a phone number for you. It appears to be mostly unchanged since the Windows 95

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days right down to that very old school pixelated logo that appears in the taskbar when you open it.

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If you want to see it for yourself, open up the run dialog and then punch in dialer.

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You'll get a simple interface with a space to enter the number you want to call, a keypad if you'd rather just click the digits one at a time for some masochistic reason,

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and eight programmable speed dial slots, just like the landline phones of yesteryear.

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Of course, you'll need an actual phone modem in order for this functionality to work,

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but the good news is that these are still available for the retro computing enthusiast.

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We all know one. Let's move on and talk about the character map. This one is still accessible

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under Windows tools in the start menu and probably still has more practical usage

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than the old phone dialer. The character map actually goes back all the way to the days of

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Windows 3.1 and serves the same purpose now as it did then. It displays all characters included

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in a particular font and makes it easy to copy the one that you need to the clipboard. So if you

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need the trademark symbol or one of the Greek letters to advertise your next sorority event,

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or that sharp ass that looks like the letter B because you're typing something in German because

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you're really bad, you could find it on the character map along with special alt codes for

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some characters that allow you to type them in directly from the keyboard. Google's ability

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to quickly bring up a special character has made the character map less relevant, but it's still

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quite useful if you know what you're looking for or if your interconnection is down. Wordpad,

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which has also been around since Windows 95, has been a mainstay because for a long time,

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it was hard to imagine operating system shipping without a word processor. In fact,

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it replaced an older program called Microsoft Right that first appeared in Windows 1.0.

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Microsoft has actually done a reasonable enough job keeping up with the program. The modern version

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resembles a simpler version of Microsoft Word down to the newish ribbon UI. Wordpad has more

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features than Windows other built-in text editor, Notepad, which made it very useful for folks that

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didn't want to shell out money for a standalone word processor. But these days, free alternatives

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like Google Docs offer features that Wordpad doesn't, such as spellcheck and collaborative

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tools like comments. Perhaps this is why Microsoft decided in late 2023 that it would no longer be

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included with new, clean installations of Windows 11, especially considering that a flaw in Wordpad

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was targeted recently by malware. But of course, the more cynical take is that they'd rather not

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give a rich text editor away for free when they can try and push people toward Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

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Perpetual money. And here's one more that you might actually still be using regularly if you have a mechanical hard

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drive. Disk defragmenter. You can learn more about defragmentation in this video, but the

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gist of it is that it'll take any files that have become fragmented and put them into one

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continuous space on your disk, speeding up file access. This is the big deal for mechanical drives,

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as file fragmentation can really hurt performance. But defragging SSDs can wear them out prematurely

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because SSDs aren't mechanical. There isn't a downside of a file being broken up into non-continuous

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chunks. So instead, modern Windows versions give you options for optimizing your SSD by running

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the trim command, which prepares blocks to have new data written to them. Since Windows is supposed

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to do this automatically every so often, you might not ever touch the disk defragmenter slash drive

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optimizer program anymore, which means there's a good chance you've hurt its feelings and it never

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forgets. But there are other old-school Windows features that are still around, so let us know

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if you're interested in a part two of this trip down memory lane. Thanks for watching guys,

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if you liked this video hit like, hit subscribe, and maybe hit up that video about storage and the

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defragmentation in Gliven. It's a good one.