I'm gettin' paranoid!!

My HP laptop hauled off and died about six weeks ago. My local Geek Squad (that's what they call themselves) took it to their shop and worked on it. Basically, terminal illness (among other things, the hard drive was about to die), and they couldn't save my four years worth of accumulated e-mail (not the end of the world, I needed to dung it out anyway), but they did save all my documents, photos, and such.

They charged me for their time ($150 for three hours) and offered to sell me a refurbished HP laptop for $100. The new old one has more features than my dearly departed machine, including a 17" screen compared to my old one's 15" screen.

But here's the rub:

All of my Microsoft Word documents (the book I'm working on, a batch of magazine articles I've written, essays, all sorts of stuff, including several hundred song sheets complete with chords) have converted themselves to Wordpad format. Pain in the behind!

If I pull a document in Wordpad format into MS Word and work on it, I then try to save it as a Word document by clicking on the "File" menu, then on "Save as." I then specify "Word Document," and click on "Save."

When I go looking for it again, it has gone right back to Wordpad format.

Any ideas as to how I can either convert the whole shebang to MS Word, or at least get something I save as a Word document to stay in that format?

Don Firth