I want to know if there somekind of utility to let me read txt or rtf files on my old gateway laptop computer without booting the operating sytem, i've heard of some bootable floppy disks with full interfaces so why cant it be done to view txt's?

To the best of my knowledge, the text editor can be used offline, if you go to File> Work offline. However you can't get there unless you boot the computer. You don't need an internet connection . Doc is Word and rtf is Wordpad- both available through the operating system.

Whats the big deal about loading the OS to use your software ?
But you could Print them and buy a Ringbinder to store them.
Thats what i do.

Zak, a thought occurs to me- is it possible that you don't have an OS on the computer? Because if you don't, the editing features won't be on the system.

yes, the computer that i am talking about dosent have an os or a hard drive or a cd-drive nor do I want to trouble my self trying to fix it, but i want to try if possible to use ms-dos or some other way to read text files, any ideas?

move the HD to a running system as a SLAVE hd

Ms-Dos is an Operating System os
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This is ridiculous to ask,but what are these files on ?
It has to be a Floppy or a CD or a Hard drive.
So please delete this dumb post.

There is nothing dumb about my post, the computer dose have a floppy drive and four usb drives and what I ment when I said to use ms-dos to read txt files is if there is a way to boot ms-dos using floppy disks that enables me to read txt files that are all alredy on some kind of removable storage i.e floppy disks or usb drives.

No again,You have to install the Dos Operating System.
Then you can read with it's text reader,but not pdf.
Adobe is a Windows application.
You also need to know Dos commands.
Do you want a copy of Dos to install ?
You need an OS .........

One can run an OS off a floppy no problem.

Does your laptop support booting from USB drives? You could set up DOS or Linux on a USB stick and have a usable system. Plain floppies probably won't work for you since you can't fit many programs on a single 1.44MB floppy.

better yet; boot a CD version of linux which will mount your HD
(IFF it's got a partition table)

That's hard to do without a CD-ROM drive
Well, unless you have USB CD-ROM and you can boot from such a device..

but more probable than a DOS Floppy with sufficient assets