Recovered Word Files Won't Open

I formatted a USB by mistake and used Piriform Recuva to try to get the files back. Recovered files have a red, yellow or green dot beside their names, and I assume that red means not recovered, and green means fully recovered. I've tried opening some of the ones marked green but all I get are symbols instead of text. Can annyone explain please?

I used Recuva to restore files from a formatted USB. Results came marked with a red, yellow or green dot. Presumably red men's not recoverable, yellow means partially recoverable and green means fully recoverable, so I tried some of the green files. None work: the Word files come up as symbols and the jpegs won't open, even using Photoshop. What am I doing wrong?

I can only think of one thing. All these files were created on my old PC which runs Windows XP, but Recuva won't install on it so I installed it onto my laptop which runs Windows 10, and tried doing the file recovery on that. Can anyone suggest anything else

 

Thanks, TimW. I did try to install Recuva on the PC that has XP, because that's the PC I created all the files on. Unfortunately, it wouldn't install, though I tried several times. Once, a message came up that said it couldn't find a certain file, but I didn't understand what that meant.

 

Use the portable version of Recuva.