WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.120 Did you know that there are programs from Windows 95, which came out 28 years ago, 00:00:05.120 --> 00:00:08.960 that are still included with Windows 11? Let's have a look at some of the more 00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:13.520 surprising ones, starting with phone dialer. This does exactly what it says it will, 00:00:13.520 --> 00:00:17.920 dial a phone number for you. It appears to be mostly unchanged since the Windows 95 00:00:17.920 --> 00:00:22.560 days right down to that very old school pixelated logo that appears in the taskbar when you open it. 00:00:22.560 --> 00:00:26.640 If you want to see it for yourself, open up the run dialog and then punch in dialer. 00:00:26.640 --> 00:00:34.320 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, 00:00:34.320 --> 00:00:38.800 and eight programmable speed dial slots, just like the landline phones of yesteryear. 00:00:39.760 --> 00:00:43.600 Of course, you'll need an actual phone modem in order for this functionality to work, 00:00:43.600 --> 00:00:47.600 but the good news is that these are still available for the retro computing enthusiast. 00:00:47.600 --> 00:00:52.720 We all know one. Let's move on and talk about the character map. This one is still accessible 00:00:52.720 --> 00:00:57.280 under Windows tools in the start menu and probably still has more practical usage 00:00:57.280 --> 00:01:01.440 than the old phone dialer. The character map actually goes back all the way to the days of 00:01:01.440 --> 00:01:07.840 Windows 3.1 and serves the same purpose now as it did then. It displays all characters included 00:01:07.840 --> 00:01:13.040 in a particular font and makes it easy to copy the one that you need to the clipboard. So if you 00:01:13.040 --> 00:01:17.680 need the trademark symbol or one of the Greek letters to advertise your next sorority event, 00:01:17.680 --> 00:01:21.760 or that sharp ass that looks like the letter B because you're typing something in German because 00:01:21.760 --> 00:01:26.640 you're really bad, you could find it on the character map along with special alt codes for 00:01:26.640 --> 00:01:30.560 some characters that allow you to type them in directly from the keyboard. Google's ability 00:01:30.560 --> 00:01:35.440 to quickly bring up a special character has made the character map less relevant, but it's still 00:01:35.440 --> 00:01:40.160 quite useful if you know what you're looking for or if your interconnection is down. Wordpad, 00:01:40.160 --> 00:01:46.080 which has also been around since Windows 95, has been a mainstay because for a long time, 00:01:46.080 --> 00:01:50.080 it was hard to imagine operating system shipping without a word processor. In fact, 00:01:50.080 --> 00:01:55.520 it replaced an older program called Microsoft Right that first appeared in Windows 1.0. 00:01:55.520 --> 00:01:59.840 Microsoft has actually done a reasonable enough job keeping up with the program. The modern version 00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:06.000 resembles a simpler version of Microsoft Word down to the newish ribbon UI. Wordpad has more 00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:11.360 features than Windows other built-in text editor, Notepad, which made it very useful for folks that 00:02:11.360 --> 00:02:16.160 didn't want to shell out money for a standalone word processor. But these days, free alternatives 00:02:16.160 --> 00:02:20.480 like Google Docs offer features that Wordpad doesn't, such as spellcheck and collaborative 00:02:20.480 --> 00:02:26.160 tools like comments. Perhaps this is why Microsoft decided in late 2023 that it would no longer be 00:02:26.160 --> 00:02:31.920 included with new, clean installations of Windows 11, especially considering that a flaw in Wordpad 00:02:31.920 --> 00:02:37.280 was targeted recently by malware. But of course, the more cynical take is that they'd rather not 00:02:37.280 --> 00:02:43.280 give a rich text editor away for free when they can try and push people toward Microsoft 365 subscriptions. 00:02:44.160 --> 00:02:50.240 Perpetual money. And here's one more that you might actually still be using regularly if you have a mechanical hard 00:02:50.240 --> 00:02:56.080 drive. Disk defragmenter. You can learn more about defragmentation in this video, but the 00:02:56.080 --> 00:03:00.560 gist of it is that it'll take any files that have become fragmented and put them into one 00:03:00.560 --> 00:03:05.840 continuous space on your disk, speeding up file access. This is the big deal for mechanical drives, 00:03:05.840 --> 00:03:11.600 as file fragmentation can really hurt performance. But defragging SSDs can wear them out prematurely 00:03:11.600 --> 00:03:17.680 because SSDs aren't mechanical. There isn't a downside of a file being broken up into non-continuous 00:03:17.680 --> 00:03:23.520 chunks. So instead, modern Windows versions give you options for optimizing your SSD by running 00:03:23.520 --> 00:03:28.720 the trim command, which prepares blocks to have new data written to them. Since Windows is supposed 00:03:28.720 --> 00:03:34.640 to do this automatically every so often, you might not ever touch the disk defragmenter slash drive 00:03:34.640 --> 00:03:40.320 optimizer program anymore, which means there's a good chance you've hurt its feelings and it never 00:03:40.320 --> 00:03:45.200 forgets. But there are other old-school Windows features that are still around, so let us know 00:03:45.200 --> 00:03:49.200 if you're interested in a part two of this trip down memory lane. Thanks for watching guys, 00:03:49.200 --> 00:03:53.200 if you liked this video hit like, hit subscribe, and maybe hit up that video about storage and the 00:03:53.200 --> 00:03:56.560 defragmentation in Gliven. It's a good one.