Thoughts on no floppy drive...

[Nick_B]

Originally posted by mrspm2003



word. Senario: You work on an english paper for 4 days, decide you are going to print it next morning. Well it's next morning already, your pc says that no MBR was found. You're like what the heck!? Well, you have a handy boot floppy to get to the command prompt, but wait! No floppy in your system! Just buy one dude, install it, and if you don't want to have it operational, still just buy one, screw it in to the case, but you don't have to connect it. Whenever you need it, just plug in the cables. Win/Win situation.

Wouldn't matter. If I write a paper, I immediately send it to multiple personal FTP sites and a couple of e-mail addresses because I don't trust floppies and I don't put all my trust into one or two internet sites. I've almost completely bred out floppies from my computing arsenal. i still have I think one drive, but that's between like 6 computers.

[Mr. Tux]

My mobo (Epox 8KHA+) can with a dead FDD controller, and I'm too lazy to RMA it, so I'm stuck without one. But I'm not really stuck as I've never needed to use it.

[Louisville Slugger]

Ashpool has a good point, those key drives are becoming more and more useful. I've heard that they can hold up to 1GB on a single key! Imagine 1 GB of data dangling off your key chain. But for now a floppy couldn't hurt. For driver purposes, and for backing up small docs. You never know, the e-mail server might go down when something is due. Then you can't recieve the e-mail with the attachment. Just my opinion anyways.

[ua549]

I have not used a floppy for over 5 years. I still have one in the spare parts bin but I have no place to install it. Win XP and Win NET have virtually every disk controller driver built into the distribution media. The exception may be in some high end RAID U320 controllers.

I ordered a new notebook computer today. It doesn't come with a floppy. If you need to use one it must dangle at the end of a dongle.

[archshrk]

Originally posted by Hypo_Luxa
Anyone else try this yet and how is it working out?

I'm no expert (don't even know how to flash my BIOS) but When I built my first rig, I went without a floppy and havn't had any problems. I got lucky tho, my NIC came with a CD but the one I picked up for my roommate only had floppy (he's got one)

If its for you, keep it on the side for future use or backwards like Casper1612 and TAZTG have. If you build for others...once its built, what are they gonna use it for? (I know, I know - small files)

[Derringer]

Floppy drives are a must have! Business still use it because it is a cheap format, and the disks themselves are dead cheap. Also, schools still use floppys, so if you have an essay, a floppy is needed.

[AverageJoe]

Personally I just email things to myself (or upload it to my netfirms ftp). I do have a floppy drive in my computer, but it's only because I needed a floppy drive to load the raid controllers in order to install winXP. Also, my roommate seems to love floppies and he sometimes uses my computer.

[freakboy]

Originally posted by AverageJoe
Personally I just email things to myself (or upload it to my netfirms ftp). I do have a floppy drive in my computer, but it's only because I needed a floppy drive to load the raid controllers in order to install winXP. Also, my roommate seems to love floppies and he sometimes uses my computer.

Floppies are so unreliable, that I'd never use one unless I was absolutely forced to. (Of course I needed one to flash my video card recently.) do you guys serious use them to carry around files? I remember doing that in college and the disks were constantly DOA whenever I needed them.

Floppies suck.

Freakboy

[KommisMar]

Indeed. It seems like more and more floppies nowadays develop bad sectors after just a little use.

My current computer has a floppy drive, but I've never connected it. What's the point?

You need it for BIOS flashes, but not necessary if you pick a platform that's already fully mature (I'm using a PIII-Tualatin).

I could see maybe moving files around the office or turning in assignments at school, but can't CDRs be used much more conveniently for this?

The CDR is the new floppy disk.

[THESANTINI]

I don't have a floppy and have no regrets.

[Positron]

I still use floppy disks for my school projects, in addition to other things like storing my bank security code. When I write essays, reports etc. I think it is still useful to use floppy disks in my case, since our school doesn´t have a fancy computer configuration. In fact we are still using the old 166 MHz Pentium processors and some P3 and P4 processors, along with a HUB network.
Therefore, most of our computers at school are particularly slow, unfortunately.

Our IT teacher requires that we sometimes deliver our assignments to her on a floppy disk, so I think it is still worth it to have a floppy disk (at least in my case).

[bluesfusion]

All those saying they dont have floppies obviously dont have or use RAID ports. Win2K only accepts Raid drivers from the floppy. I have like 4-5 dead floppy drives around cause my old apt used to be full of sawdust from my woodworking projects and those FDDs are dust magnets.

Good thing is those dead FDDs work sometimes for 10 mins so when I want to install Win2K and RAID drivers, I try each of them till I find one that works temporarily.

[briareus]

I didn't get one for my latest Win2K system and haven't needed one at all. However, it is handy to have one for flashing and for loading drivers. For copying files to/from my system I can use the floppy on another of my networked machines... Until it gets old anyway.

[Kero-chan]

about the only reason i keep mine in is because sometimes i might need to flash my bios or flash some hardware like a dvd-rom or something...

[ua549]

Originally posted by bluesfusion
All those saying they dont have floppies obviously dont have or use RAID ports. Win2K only accepts Raid drivers from the floppy. I have like 4-5 dead floppy drives around cause my old apt used to be full of sawdust from my woodworking projects and those FDDs are dust magnets.

Good thing is those dead FDDs work sometimes for 10 mins so when I want to install Win2K and RAID drivers, I try each of them till I find one that works temporarily.

Not exactly. I load raid drivers directly from the DVD boot disk.
All my software from MS comes on DVD.

I just purchased a new notebook without a floppy drive. Same as my old 1998 notebook, no floppy drive. I have not used a floppy since 1994 or 1995 IRRC.