When is the last time you used one? I can't remember. My laptop doesn't have one, previous one had external that shipped as accessory. I needed some brackets to add a HDD to my desktop and it occurred to me I could steal the ones from the floppy. We got the desktop a year ago and never used the floppy anyway.
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David
The chief cause of failure in this life is giving up what you want most for what you want at the moment. -
I had to go round up a portable to hook up with a USB cable a couple of years ago to salvage some old stock trade info. That's the only time in around 4 years on my own PCs. Some of the systems that I use in my job still have them but that's primarily because the military still insist on keeping them as part of the spec (because that's the way it has always been
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I keep several around, so they can be used for DBAN (hard drive scrubber, for those that don't know), before the old drives get disected for magnets. When my test motherboard gets replaced with one that boots from USB, then that will probably go.She couldn't tell the difference between the escape pod, and the bathroom. We had to go back for her.........................Twice.Comment
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I used one a couple months ago when I had to check a RAID array on one of my old servers at the office. The RAID card is an older mylex without an onboard configuration utility. The server is running 6 pentium-pro overdives if that gives you a clue to it's age..ErikComment
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I used to use them for flashing the BIOS, but now that modern motherboards will reliably boot from USB flash drives, there is no need for floppies.Comment
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Must be an old ALR server. IIRC, they were the only ones that could get 6 Pent. Pros working on a motherboard. Somehow they tricked the machine and made it see the 2nd bank of 3 as the 4th processor on bank one.
In my shop, we're retiring floppies. Only time we use them is for DBAN, and most of the time we use a bootable CD for that."It's a dog eat dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear."- Norm (from Cheers)
Eat beef-because the west wasn't won on salad.Comment
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All the new HP desktops we're getting come without floppies. They don't even have a slot for one.Bob
Bad decisions make good stories.Comment
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Yep, ALR is right, but this particular one has Gateway2000 branding. Gateway bought ALR some time ago. The 2 Tri-cpu boards are ALR from one of my other hexes. It is in a half height ALR rackmount cabinet though. Sitting above my old Intel SC450NX quad slot-2 P-3 xeon server.
That hex ought to be retired, but it still performs rock solid as one of the fileservers in our small firm. Besides, out of the 3 servers we have two are my personal machines. I like the good feeling of job security they give me.ErikComment
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Use 'em all the time for loading disk controller drivers on WinXP,2003, etc. during initial setup.Comment
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Floppy drives have gone the way ashtrays in new cars are going. Hard to find, and as time goes on, used less.
EdDo you know about kickback? Ray has a good writeup here... https://www.sawdustzone.org/articles...mare-explained
For a kickback demonstration video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/910584...demonstration/Comment
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Both my old laptop and my newer desktop have floppy drives. Still use them to back up a couple of programs that I started using years ago. Just never changed over to backing these programs to CD.Joe
"All things are difficult before they are easy"Comment
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I have not used one for several years. Files are too big these days. Have you noticed you can get a 8 GB flash drive for less than $35?
Our first PC was an Amstrad (English) with dual floppies - no hard drive. It has 5 1/4 floppies (remember those?). The kids were little then so it must be 20 years ago or so. LOML COULD NOT load a floppy. I put kids educational software on bootable floppies so they could turn the computer on and push their disk in and it would go. They could do it (5 years old) but she could not. I later put a hard drive on a card in (I think it was a huge 20MB) and she could use the computer but up to that point, the kids and I were OK but she never got it to work.
JimComment
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The only place I can think of that needs a floppy is for special drivers during Windows setup. I've slipstreamed the common drivers/hotfixes on the work copies and my personal copies of XP, so I don't even use it when clean installing XP to a RAID anymore.
I recently deployed 280 PC's booted with PXE from a TFTP server...So much faster than going to each and waiting for a floppy to load, or hoping the Floppy drive/media were functional (I've never considered floppies reliable). They all boot Windows, then to a locked down app. So the users don't need access to anything but the keyboard, so I had the tech's disconnect the floppies and DVD-ROM's before they installed the PC's.Comment
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When I bought my last computer I also picked up an external floppy drive that hooks into a USB port. I still have some things on floppy that I use.John HunterComment
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