USB 1.44 Floppy Disk Drives

Hope I can find some help. I'm not real high tech.
I work in the legal community and I have just received 48 extremely important floppys. I need to open them and possibly convert them to PDF or something. They are all word files.
The floppys were produced in 2002 on an IBM Format. They are also listed as ASCII disks.
I have an old external floppy drive but it just will not work on my new Windows 7 compluter.
Can anyone out there tell me what I need to be able to view these disks, and maybe copy them into some other program like PDF or WordPerfect (or even word).
They are really important disks. The content is critical.
Hope you can help.

What happens when you plug it in, are you sure it's the drive that doesn't work or maybe the disk? You can pick up a new drive for under $20 but if it is the disks then the data may be lost. Old disks can loose their magnetism and the data would be gone or at least unreadable.

Check in the BIOS to make sure the the legacy drive is enabled.

I don't think that is necessary with an external floppy drive. I could be wrong but the USB interface should handle that. I would try the external drive on another computer to see if the external drive is good, or not. If not, external USB floppy drives are about $20 so if the data is that important, $20 is cheap.

That said, like ALL magnetic storage media and especially "soft" media like floppy disks and magnetic tape, the magnetically aligned particles on the media representing the stored data lose their charge or alignment over time as the particles are influenced by the magnetic charges of the adjacent particles. So it is very likely the data on the floppy disks, including the formatting information, has degraded to a point the disks are no longer readable.

Thanks Dig....I overlooked that as I usually do when I get to hasty to answer. The same applies when I address the golf ball and try to help it....which I usually end up chilly dipping it...damn it.

No problem. And I hear you about about addressing the ball - it really does not matter how I do it, I will slice it! I am reminded of Ed Norton from the Honeymooner's. When he addresses the ball, he says, "Hello ball!"