I've got a ton of old CD's and games hanging around that I figured I'd eventually use on a Windows PC. They all say that you need Windows 95. But none of them work on this computer. So... are all these old games like Riven 2 and screen savers like After Dark useless or am I doing something wrong?

What exactly is the problem? A few old games just can't run on any recently made computer (for example, Alpha Centauri), but most others can be made to run with little effort.

The first thing to try is right click on the program and select 'properties'. Click the 'Compatibility' tab and turn on compatibility mode for win95.

2) If I put a disk into a Mac computer, it appears on the desktop. I can double click it and it opens and I can see what's there and install it or whatever.

Just put a shortcut to the D drive on your desktop.

With this Windows thing, I insert a CD, and nothing happens. Nothing shows on the screen to let me know there's even a CD in there. There's no menu bar on the screen except for this dumb looking green thing on the bottom that says 'start'.

Most game cds run a small autoplay program when inserted. If the cd doesn't autorun I can't think of what you would want the computer to do.

Open 'My Computer' from the start menu or from the icon on your desktop (if there is one). To browse the cd's contents double click on the d: icon.

To find anything I'm having to navigate through tons of folders and then have no way to go back to a previous folder so I hit start again.

Do you see those buttons at the top of the folder window? The third one from right (the one with the green arrow) goes back to the previous folder. Or, if for some reason you don't see those convenient navigation buttons, you can go through the menu bar. It's View->Go To->Up One Folder.

3) To get a CD out of my Mac I hit CMD-Y and it pops out. With this thing I have to hit the CD button to manually eject it?? I haven't had to manually eject CD's in 15 years.

Honestly, either get used to it or code up a little keypress event to open it for you. The idea of opening the cd drive from the keyboard is completely rediculous to lifelong windows users. Just press the button by the cd drive that opens it.