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 dialog and then punch in dialer.
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,
and eight programmable speed dial slots, just like the landline phones of yesteryear.
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 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 advertise your next sorority event,
or that sharp ass that looks like the letter B because you're typing something in German because
you're really bad, 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 interconnection is down. 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 Right 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 newish 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 spellcheck 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 by 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. Disk 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 disk, 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 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 disk defragmenter slash drive
optimizer program anymore, which means there's a good chance you've hurt 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 liked this video hit like, hit subscribe, and maybe hit up that video about storage and the
defragmentation in Gliven. It's a good one.