MagicByt3 has given a pretty good explanation. But if you don't understand how the code works, read my post which is written in layman terms for people having no knowledge in bitcoin.
You were asking for a question which requires the history to be revisited. When satoshi handed over the bitcoin 0.1.0 to Hal for testing purposes, he was quite interested to run the client after reading through the whitepaper. But once the client started, it crashed all of a sudden. Hence Hal posted the issue along with the debug.log file in the sourceforge website. When it was seen by satoshi, the 0.1.0 seemed to have difficulties in connecting to other nodes and also the firewall blocked the incoming connections to the node. This was the reason why he build a 0.1.2 version and released it to Hal 2 days later. This is the first and foremost bigger problem of using the older client.
The second one is that, the bitcoin 0.1.0 and higher, functions similar to a torrent client. The 0.1.0 client connected to freenode, so if your ISP doesn't allow you to connect to the freenode you won't be able to use the bitcoin (isn't it pathetic enough). Later after 6 months or so, freenode doesn't seem to work well. Hence Lazlo provided irc.lfnet.org. Here is the announcement from satoshi for that
Lets try using Laszlo's irc.lfnet.org instead of freenode. Here's RC2, that's the only change in it:
(see below for download links)
Later on, when this went down IRC function was removed completely i.e the newer nodes doesn't work the way the old client is. You need to modify the code to connect to other clients by using peers.dat
AFAIK, these are the important reasons which will prevent your client from entering the newer chain.
Anybody have a clue as to how I can connect it to other peers? Easy way?
There is no such easy way, other than modifying the code and doing some random stuffs which cannot even be compiled for people like us.
Forget that idea, and start using the newer version.
P.S You are asking for a old man to run as fast as a young man, which isn't possible at all.