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a world without 1.44 disks

N

nickburns

Senior member
i am building my new system as we speak (or type i guess) and i havent got a floppy disk drive, and now that i think about it the last 3 computers i built i never have used the floppy?...even when i installed windows, i booted from my cd rom, so i think i might not even put one in....if i need to throw something small on a disk, i can do it on my moms computer which is on my network, i mean these damn things are on there way out anyways right?...so anyone else that didnt include this with their computer or any thoughts on the subject?
 
I have 2 that didn't have floppy and CD. Just harddrive, video & network card running Windows 2000.

It really depends on what will you use the system for.
 
My floppies sole purpose of existance is to Flash Bioses.

Thats all it does.. and it does it well.

Gatsby - 1
 
You can always boot from HDD and flash BIOS under "safe mode command prompth" of MS-DOS, not neccessary from a floppy.
 
I work in an IT department and floppies are used extensively every day. They are found on every machine under the sun and are used for everything...bootable build disks, drivers, the list goes on. burning CD's just isn't feasable for casual use and most older systems can't boot from a CD. Now that I think about it, shaking our dependence on floppies is going to be extremely difficult. LS 120 drives are a good idea, but they just didn't catch on as much as they should have and are starting to show their age. Zip disks are too expensive and proprietary. A real standard needs to be set...quickly.
 
My personal system has an LS-120 (for compatability reasons) but I almost never use it.

My testbeds all have no floppy drives.

I load/flash/ghost/boot off the CDs and download drive images and program binaries over my LAN.

No problem, no floppies, no hassle =-)

PS - I keep a floppy drive handy in case of Virus. That's the only use I have for one.

Eric
 
The floppy drive quickly becomes indespensible the day you need it 🙂

Seriously, for $10, it's worth it. That's probably less than the cost of the raw materials to build one 🙂 I'm sure you'll use it for something. Even just running small files back and forth or giving documents to a friend with an older computer. Ten dollars is a small price to pay for that peace of mind.

Modus
 
I haven't had a floppy disk drive for the past 4 years.

I bought those cool nifty 240MB mini-CD-R's back, made a bootable CD with every imaginable utility on it, I even got Partition Magic 6.0 bootdisk on there. I can boot to any flavor of Win9x, WINNT 4.0, or Win2k. All off a dinky CD, and it boots up as fast as it can load drivers.

 
I rarely use my floppy drive...but I don't see what harm it can cause being there...

Packet CDRWs might be able to replace the floppy drive if PacketCDs become bootable and there is a standardized packet format set. But there is no standard to packetCDs....

Standard CDRWs won't replace floppies because to erase a file you have to erase the whole disk, that is a pain in the ass...copy the whole disc over to your hard drive, delete the file you want, format, re-write.

Personally I like click the file in windows explorer and press DEL.

Besides which, Easy CD Creator, Nero, etc are fine for us, but half the people I know struggle with Windows Explorer....

No...CDRWs have a way to go before they replace the floppy disk..

I'd love to get rid of 1.44MB floppies...but we need a standard that is as flexible as the floppy is, and so far I don't see it.

Face it, backwards compatibilty is huge in this business.
Why do you think we are still stuck with DOS in Win9x? It's taken 5 years before we can finally release DOS (this isn't MS's fault, it's just backwards compatibilty requirements).

If you can get your computer up and running without a floppy good for you 🙂 but don't expect floppies to dissappear becuase a handful of tech-geeks can do it, we do not dictate the course of this industry.
 
The main reason why I still have a floppy is b/c I need it for boot when reformatting my hd or when it crashed. Btw, I have a SCSI CDrom so I cant boot from it w/o having to mess w/DOS commands, which I want to get away from.
 
I always put a spare floppy drive in a computer to get Windows installed, then pull it. After that, as long as one computer on my network has a floppy drive I can grab any drivers I need that still come on diskette.
 
Hmmm, I considered having no floppy in my next system... but if I can find one for $10 bucks why not? Any place online that has it for $10 shipped? Shipping sometimes cost more than the drive itself...
 
A floppy disk is just a perfect way of tranferring smaller things that would be stupid to waste your time burning and carrying around an almost totally empty cd to a friend's house to show them a c++ program or so.
 
My God, just go to a local shop &amp; pick one up for <$15. I always buy Teac, but still... You can get them for $13.50.

I buy all my stuff here.

Viper GTS
 
My point wasnt about the cost...it just isnt worth it for me to throw a floppy in my computer. and if i ever needed to use a floppy disk, i jsut do it on another computer on the network, i just hate that floppy has managed to stay around for so long... i realize that in a work place they might still be rampid but i was wondering if they were becoming a thing of the past in your home PCs
 


<< and if i ever needed to use a floppy disk, i jsut do it on another computer on the network >>

Doesn't sound like it's becoming a thing of the past on your PC...you are just finding a work around. You don't have one in your case, but your PC has access to one 😉
It's the way the world works, backwards compatibility is the name of the game.
 
I only have two active floppies anymore in my systems. I have a combo 5¼ with a 3½ in my nt server. (It was in the case and wasn't worth taking out. Besides you never know when you might need to read that 5¼ that has MS Flight Simulator 1.0) Plus my workstation has a floppy drive I bought 5 years ago. But I mostly boot off of the zip drive on that system when I need a boot disk.
 
I thought about not putting a floppy in my system....but i'm glad I did....Schools in general are stuck in the past, whenever I hand in a Computer Assignment I have to submit a floppy with the program on it. In the past semester I've my floppy drive more than I have in the last three years
 
I pray for the day that damned floppy disk dies. Though this isn't a perfect world.



Seriously though, I do all of my file transfers over my network, and have my fileserver accessible on the internet. The only reason I have a floppy drive anymore is because it's too difficult to explain to some people how an ftp server works.
 
Not having a floppy has almost caused me to fail several term papers because I always do them at the last minute, and my internet connection coincidently dies the day it's due, and I don't have a printer. Actually, I *do* have a floppy, it's just that it won't WRITE to disks. I've tried 3 different drives and different cables, and I know how to orient the cable properly. I can only conclude the controller on my P3V4X is faulty. Damn POS.
 
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