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if you were building a computer, would you still stick a floppy drive in it?

HOWITIS

HOWITIS

Platinum Member
personally, for the last comp i built i did not buy a floppy drive for it. i just don't see why you would want too. the disks only hold 1.44mb, and are only good for making boot disks, IMO. i do have a cd-rw in my last home built and it seems to fit the bill. and if push comes to shove i can always hook up my old zip drive. i've heard people say they save papers on the disks to take to other places, you can't do this with a 5cent cdr? or through email?


i realize that floppy drives are cheap, but still, why are we even still using them?
 
how else would you flash yur bios?

heres what i use my floppy for.

bios flash
emergency boot disk.
registry backup
HD utilities
Transfering small files for class work.
Transfering Word files between computers.

you are extremely lucky if you can go 3 years without the first 3.

I gues you could use CD-R from some stuff. just seems wasteful/inconvient when you just need to backup or move a 32kb file.

And e-mail is notoriously unreliable. trust me In my classes we have small files shooting all over the place. and not a week goes by i dont hear about e-mail trouble from professors and students both. something to do with local network admins with qualifications like "know what windows is" most my professors are part time so they are talking about work LANs. So to avoid this they usualy require either floppys, or hard copies.

I supose its possible to boot dos from a CDR with the more current MBs but it would just seem weird to me.

 
yeah of course
simplest way to make a bootdisk.....easy way to transfer small documents from computer to computer
 
I keep one in a drawer and use it for my 3 PC's. Like folks have said, it comes in handy, but certainly nothing you need in every computer.

bart
 
yup, use it to flash bios and its the only way to copy experiment data to my computer from the labs, floppies are still gonna be around for a while atleast untill everybody upgrades, then I think USB pen drives should take over.
 
You can get one for under 10 bucks now anyway. Most of the time its more convenient to put small text files on a floppy than on a cdr, at least in my opinion.
 
it seems odd to me that people would spent $$$ on these fancy case lights and skimp on a 15 dollar floppy drive, the most widely used portable medium ever on a pc. sure you dont need it with bios flashing in windows these days, but it is very handy to have one of these around.
 
No...u don't need it...

in response to travler, it's not difficult at all to make a bootable DOS CD....keep that on hand, and then use a CDRW to burn updates bioses, flash utils, etc. onto it...
boot from the boot CD, and then put the CDRW in when u need to access the files on it that contain bios updates, etc.

that's what i do...never use a floppy.
 
you dont "need" it, you can usually find a way to do what you want without one but why not have one for compatibilitys sake? you know that eventually someone is going to give you something on a floppy or wants you to give them something on one. this is the only reason that i keep my zip100 around. and like everyone else says, it's the most efficient for bios flashing and a lot of hard disk testing and other) software downloads from the manufacturer as a floppy disk image.
my 0.02
 
Most of my professors won't let me turn in my homework on cd's, just floppies. If *God forbid* I actually have to use a lab computer on campus, I've found that more of the floppies drive work than cdroms (you are not guaranteed to have either working though). I don't know of a way to get around bios flashes and installing raid controllers without them either.
 


<< if you were building a computer, would you still stick a floppy drive in it? >>



Yeah, I would actually.. My Win2K CD isn't bootable :disgust: For most PC's though (and the ppl who use them) a floppy isn't usually needed anymore. Unless you get some ghetto hardware that still uses a floppy for drivers or software.. haha....
 
no i wouldnt, i have a spare floppy drive laying around that could be the floppy for many machines, considering i use it....basically never. last time was when i flashed my bios probably last summer.

sure, i keep the drive laying around just in case, but do i keep it hooked up? nah.
 
I would buy one but wouldn't put it in unless I had to. I never use them now.

CDs are bootable and can run DOS, thats all you need.
 
yes. they are still useful becuz i am pretty sure 99.9% of computers still have floppy drives. you can give the same percentage of computers being networks, having zip drives, and having cdrw's. its old, yes... but still useful.
 
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