Malke said:
P. Jayant wrote:
Granted that Floppy as a medium of data storage is outdated but it is
very useful for newbies for storing their work or loading their home
work problems. Unfortunately XP has problems with floppies. Data
copied on floppies from Sony's pre-formatted floppies in IBM format on
one XP computer cannot be read on another XP computer. Even data
stored on a floppy formatted on one computer by XP cannot be opened on
another XP computer. In both cases, XP says, "the floppy in a drive is
not formatted; do you want to format the floppy?"
Is there any way to overcome this problem?
P. Jayant
Yes - don't use floppies. They are unreliable and only hold a tiny
amount of data. Most new computers don't even have floppy drives.
Newbies should use a usb thumb drive to transfer files. You can buy a
512MB thumb drive for $10-20USD. I just bought a 2GB one for $70.
Malke
Wow, it is sad that the humble floppy does not work well in XP. I don't
remember 98SE having this many problems with floppies. Why is it that
Microsoft does upgrades and removes features that are popular with users
in previous versions of Windows and perhaps this explains why 98SE is
still so popular with users. I was posting about the lack of a startup
menu also in XP Pro. compared to 98SE where you go into msconfig and
under general tab, click advanced and enable the startup menu.
Apparently, there is no similar feature found in XP Pro. that lets users
have the startup menu each time without having to press [F8]. It can be
really useful for a power user like me to be able to start in whatever
mode that they want to start in. For example, if my computer gets
infected with spyware, adware or viruses I want to be able to use the
startup menu to boot into safe mode to help troubleshoot the problem.
If a piece of hardware is failing then it will be useful to have the
startup menu enabled to help troubleshoot the problem. The start up
menu in my opinion is critical to letting the user maintain control over
their computer. This is one area that is problematic in XP Pro. is that
it seems to treat the user as a dummy. Even with an administrator
account, it can be harder to get to the root of the problem. 98SE had a
maintenance operating system which was DOS according to Chris Quirke,
MVP. XP Pro. does have a recovery console which is useful but seems to
lack the flexibility of DOS. Anyway, I will continue to dual-boot with
98SE and XP Pro. for as long as possible since some things must be done
in XP Pro. since it is the modern operating system.