Building PC, to floppy or not to floppy?

[jaeger]

What drivers? There are none required for USB in XP.

Some of Sandisk's readers require XP drivers.

 

[bLaKeY]

At the end of the day, Apple Macs haven't had a floppy drive for years now,
so I'm sure you could work around it somehow..

Dave

I work in a Graphic Design studio and we had to buy an external floppy drive
for our macs.
Not everyone updates their equipment as fast as they should (or could) and
floppy disks are still used daily.
Most profitable businesses have a 7 year time period before they are due to
update.
Also most of my PC customers still use floppies (with hundreds of stickers
on top of each other so you can barely fit it in the drive ) for small
jobs sent to us.

For a 'normal' PC user it is easier to use a floppy disk than create a Ram
disk or a bootable CD. Most people could insert a floppy disk. I could only
name possibly two people I know who could create a Ramdisk and only a few
who could create a bootable CD.

For the sake of a couple of packs of smokes, or a round of drinks an
internal floppy is very worthwhile.

Blakey

 

[jaeger]

For a 'normal' PC user it is easier to use a floppy disk than create a Ram
disk or a bootable CD. Most people could insert a floppy disk. I could only
name possibly two people I know who could create a Ramdisk and only a few
who could create a bootable CD.

So we're back to "interfacing with archaic machines". Is there anything
else? And BTW, "normal" PC users aren't building their own computers.
Anyone who does can certainly make a boot CD.

As an aside, the king of "normal" PC's, Dell, has stopped making
floppies standard.

 

[Milleron]

Legacy USB combined with USB emulation.

Huh?
Ron

 

[jaeger]

Huh?

You know how you can use a USB KB or mouse in DOS? This is called
legacy USB, basically using USB devices with no drivers. Most mobos
made in the last 1-2 years will also emulate a USB drive as something
else, meaning it fools the OS(DOS, in this case) into thinking it's a
floppy drive, hard drive, etc.

 

[blackgold]

Anything better than Ghost, either free or paying.

 

[Ben Pope]

CF cards are not robust enough. Pull one out of a cardreader while
it's
being read, and chances are pretty good it'll be fried afterwards. Had
that happen just a few days ago with a relatively new 256 meg card.
Fortunately it was possible to get most images off (phew), a number of
sectors apparently in the FAT were unreadable. After trying to
reformat
a couple of times, the card is now totally unusable. Try the same
with a (preferably write protected) floppy - the OS might crash, but
apart from that...

Apart from that the disk will likely be corrupt and/or knackered unless you
keep it in that lead-lined disk box.

When I had my Atari ST, floppy disks were brilliant - they didn't get
corrupted, they lasted forever, write after write after write, you could
still read. My experience of floppies in the last 5 years has been
atrocious. Every time I pick up a floppy, it;s corrupt to the point where
even a low-level format will not revivie it. They're absolute crap and all
deserve to be burned.

New floppies are often of low quality, it seems, but many older ones
still work just fine. Apart from that, these days a floppy is not the
right place to store valuable data anyway, if only for the lack of
capacity. But for things like BIOS updates (Windows based mobo bios
flashers, who invented that crap?), emergency boot disks or driver
disks (ever tried to install Windows XP on some storage controller it
doesn't
know? the setup will only accept drivers from the A: drive!) they're
still useful. Cost for a floppy drive is pretty much nil these days,
there are tons of used ones available.

Bootable (El Torito) CDs emulate the A: drive. As can USB devices such as
CF card readers and many other devices when plugged into a modern
motherboard.

Floppies are useful because they are easy, but if I can do the same job with
a CF card reader I will use that. CF media is far superior to floppy in
almost all ways - speed, capacity, reliabilty, robustness...

Ben

 

[Ben Pope]

Copying a paper (five minutes from the deadline) from my laptop to a
school computer, so I can print it out.

Quicker over a network. If you or your school is not connected, shame on
you/them.

Ben

 

[Ben Pope]

It can be embarrasing to save your MYOB stuff to a USB device then
have your accountant tell you he can`t use it and in the meantime you
are paying in excess of a hundred bucks an hour for his services.
Kind of makes the floppy drive look good.

Kind of makes your 100 bucks an hour accountant look crap for not investing
in a 50bucks 6in1 card reader.

Ben

 

[Ben Pope]

Am I the only one here who's paying any attention? I already noted
that interfacing with archaic machines is a unique reason, albeit one
that has no bearing on this discussion if you go back and read the
original post.

"I have a LAN and the other computers have floppies"

Guess you're not paying attention.



Ben

 

[jaeger]

OK guys. You have had enough fun with jaeger.

Yes, it was great fun. The arguments I got reminded me of watching a
"special" kid repeatedly bash his body into a door marked "pull".

 

[ELVIS2000]

I'm considering not putting a floppy drive in my new computer. I have a LAN
and the other computers have floppies. Anyone see a reason why I should
include one? Thanks.
-- Scott

Only $8 and you never know...

 

[Roger Zoul]

bp wrote:
::
::: In article <[email protected]>,
::: (e-mail address removed) says...
:::
:::: Copying a paper (five minutes from the deadline) from my laptop to
:::: a school computer, so I can print it out.
:::
::: Did I miss the part where the original poster was building a laptop?
::
:: here try this
::
:: Copying a paper (five minutes from the deadline) from my PC to a
:: school computer, so I can print it out.

USB thumbdrive...

 

[Nom]

I'm considering not putting a floppy drive in my new computer. I have a LAN
and the other computers have floppies. Anyone see a reason why I should
include one? Thanks.

They cost £5 - why NOT include one ? You don't lose anything by having one !

 

[Dodgy]

You can add the drivers to a custom WinXP CD. In fact, this is the
smart way to do it since you can add all your drivers, plus you can set
the switches so that you don't have to babysit the install.


Partition Magic will recover from the install CD. Ghost is crap unless
you do enterprise deployment, but the image disc itself is bootable.

Fine if the floppy-less pc isn't you're only pc... But if it is you're
gonna have a few problems making that CD. :-D

I must admit I very very rarely use a floppy, but at times it's useful
for...

- Bios update
- Transferring a few files to a machine that's not on the network
(usually it's the NIC drivers I'm transferring and assuming it's not a
Intel 20meg driver package, I still can't bring myself to waste a CD
on 300K of drivers!)

Only the other night a friend asked me to help him install win2k onto
a brand new machine he was building which had a sata hard drive...
Needless to say an F6 3rd party drivers install was required and the
drivers he had on the supplied CD just didn't work... A quick download
from the net on my laptop and a floppy disk later... tada... working.
No cdr on my laptop, and I wouldn't for less that a floppies worth of
temp files anyway!

My question back to you would have to be...

Why waste a CDR on <1.4meg of files that are only going to be required
for 2 minutes and never wanted again?

Final thought - You know there's never a CDR about when you want one,
but you can always find a floppy... Usually in the box the CDROM came
in...

D0d6y.

 

[Dodgy]

Obviously you don`t own a lappy. You don`t know what you are missing. Then
again, if you don`t leave the house you wouldn`t need a lappy.

LMAO!

D0d6y.

 

[Dodgy]

bp wrote:
::
::: In article <[email protected]>,
::: (e-mail address removed) says...
:::
:::: Copying a paper (five minutes from the deadline) from my laptop to
:::: a school computer, so I can print it out.
:::
::: Did I miss the part where the original poster was building a laptop?
::
:: here try this
::
:: Copying a paper (five minutes from the deadline) from my PC to a
:: school computer, so I can print it out.

USB thumbdrive...

Unless you happen to be working with NT 4...

 

[eddie]

bp wrote:
::
::: In article <[email protected]>,
::: (e-mail address removed) says...
:::
:::: Copying a paper (five minutes from the deadline) from my laptop to
:::: a school computer, so I can print it out.
:::
::: Did I miss the part where the original poster was building a laptop?
::
:: here try this
::
:: Copying a paper (five minutes from the deadline) from my PC to a
:: school computer, so I can print it out.

USB thumbdrive...

??
Don't buy a 10.00 floppy buy a 75.00 thumb drive and hope everyone you
deal with has USB.

yeah good one.

 

[eddie]

Also, keep in mind that you do not want to restrict yourself to only one
means of transferring information. I'm doing this on a laptop and often
transfer files back and forth to my desktop. For files less than a Meg I'll
use a floppy. For files up to 128 MB's I can use the Handy stick. For files
larger than that I can hook up a Parallel cable and use Laplink. If worse
comes to worse and the Laptop crashes I can pull the Harddrive and use an
adaptor to transfer all the files to the Desktop.

Have you thought about a network ?

 

[Denny Salatino]

I'm considering not putting a floppy drive in my new computer. I have a LAN
and the other computers have floppies. Anyone see a reason why I should
include one? Thanks.
-- Scott

****
Scott, I aways keep both A and B floppies in my computers even if not
used a lot. the cost is near nothing.
I sometimes copy from one to the other for small files
or read files between them for comparing data on 2 disk's.
there are other reasons for keeping them on line and handy.
you may just wish you had put one in one day when you have a need for it.
Denny.