Jamie laughed. "You can't force a modern OS to love a 20-year-old phone. You have to trick it."

"When modern Windows refuses to talk to old hardware, don't fight the OS—speak the old device's language. Install the original driver suite from the phone's era (Nokia PC Suite) in compatibility mode, then manually point Windows to that driver. The driver is not 'for Windows 10'—it's for the phone . You just need Windows 10 to borrow it." Final Pro Tip (If you only want SMS/texts): Skip all this. Buy a cheap USB IRDA dongle (infrared). The Nokia 3310 can beam texts via infrared to Windows 10 with no driver required . Windows sees it as a serial device automatically.

Alex found his old Nokia 3310 in a drawer. The battery still had three bars (no surprise there). He wanted to retrieve ancient SMS memories and load a few classic ringtones (remember "Nokia tune" in MIDI?).