The floppy drive. Dinosaur or or relic. You choose.

[Psycho_Dad_Rules]

Hi all,

I know the floppy drive is reaaaaaaally old, but although it it possible to do without it's just stil to much trouble.
For instance: What if you want to upgrade the bios of your motherboard and your running Windows XP of a NTFS formatted harddrive.
Instead of copying the upgrade files to your boot disk, you need to create a bootable CD (Preferably RW) which takes a lot more time and effort, plus you wil never use that RW for something until you erase the whole thing because it's bootable !!!

It's a bit like... lots of disco's still use vinyl beause of the easy of use. Although most things which can be done with a vinyl record can now be done by a proffesional cd player, it's just not the same (as easy...)

So until they come up with some just as easy, it's floppy all the way for me


Greetz,

pSyChO dAd

[Hardcoreruss]

I still use the floppy for the odd word and excel doc's. I think they will totally dead by 2005.

[Bradskey]

Hi all,

For instance: What if you want to upgrade the bios of your motherboard and your running Windows XP of a NTFS formatted harddrive.
Instead of copying the upgrade files to your boot disk, you need to create a bootable CD (Preferably RW) which takes a lot more time and effort, plus you wil never use that RW for something until you erase the whole thing because it's bootable !!!

My system, which isn't quite bleeding edge, has the flash utility built into the BIOS, so no need to boot anything. It does look for the ROM file on a floppy however, but in the future I see no reason why it couldn't be made to search a partition, a CD, or a bit of flash.

And I've dealt with these notebooks and desknotes which require a boot floppy to flash, but have no floppy drive. No way in hell I'm going to spend $80 for one of those external floppy drives ( I mean, c'mon its still just a lame floppy drive), so I always have to fire up Nero and make a bootable CDRW with the utility and ROM -- quite annoying.

[oldfart13]

I still use the floppy a bit yet. Saved my ass the other day when I had severe problems with my 98SE machine. Safe mode couldn't be reached and therefore the CD-ROM couldn't be used. The floppy booted A-Okay and I was able to fix the problem by accessing the CD-ROM driver on the disc. Don't count out the floppy even though DELL might. It's probably in the vast majority of PC business machines in the WORLD.

[EddyH]

Floppy drive = still useful. Not dead for a good few years yet.

Why? Because to get a workable system off the ground, you don't need much speed or a lot of bytes, and it's one of the few things that can be affordably encoded into BIOS ROM rather than Flash. So a rescue disc will work even if you've screwed the rest of it up. Generally unless it's been tinkered with, the computer will look for a boot floppy before all else, too, so if something's wrong, just slap in your DOS disc, or write-protected Norton AV Rescue floppy, and away.

And many people don't have the ability to type more than a megabyte at a time (myself included, amazingly), so if you're just making word documents, excel spreadsheets, and the like (or even simplistic powerpoints, webpages, low rez pictures), it does the trick. Faster than CD would, too; just click it in, press save-to-A:, and a minimum of 3.5 / maximum of 94 seconds later, you're done.

Pretty soon, they should be replaced by memory cards / sticks though. Similar instant access and accessibility/portability, increasingly cheap per Mb (not more than a couple months before they're actually better value than floppies, i would say), much faster and more spacious, smaller, etc etc etc, and they can still be write protected. Well most of them...
All it needs is a card reader to take the place of the floppy disc slot, and be natively supported in BIOS. Hopefully some motherboard / peripheral manuf is reading this and gets an idea??

There's PCs being sold with USB sockets on the front, as well as the Macs, which is a decent halfway point (plug in digicam with memory card, or one of those memory-keychain things) so long as your system has the drivers and everything. But until you can pop in your system / recovery memory card (with as much space as an old 386 hard disc ), the floppy will *still* not be dead, not in the PC world anyway.
Oh yeah. And the compatibility with older machines which may not have USB, the ability to use external card readers of any type, or perhaps not even a CDROM drive, of course. (or a hard disc..)

I have stacks of CDROMs, a RW drive, and a digicam that can read smartmedia, but I still have a pack'o'10 floppies totalling an amazing 13.9mb of storage in the cabinet next to the PC. For the J.I.C, you know..