Hello.

I am putting together a new win xp system very shortly. I'm just
waiting for a graphics card and CDRW to arrive for it.

I just wondered if I really need to have a 3.5" drive? Would I have
problems if I didn't have one installed, or could I do everything from
CD?

Thanks

John

You don't really *need* it, as you can do most things with a bootable CD
these days. However, it can be more convenient in some respects, and only
costs like $10 (US).


...
"John" <mickey@mouse.com> wrote in message
news:hdsktvs33mt1htu20pjm95a12ti74peth6@4ax.com...

John wrote:
probably two or three years, except on very old computers which do not
allow booting from CD.

Just yesterday though I purchased a small business accounting program
(Australian), which for some unknown reason required a floppy with an
unlocking code before I could use all the features. Utterly ridiculous
in this day and age, but there you go!

The cost of a floppy drive is trivial, so I guess it does not hurt to
install one, even though it will be very rarely used.

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Cheers
Oldus Fartus

"Oldus Fartus" <denisand@netNOSPAMspace.net.au> wrote in message
news:brdtl2$2g5$1@otis.netspace.net.au...
At the very least, it makes for a nice dust collection device. ;-)

John wrote:
I'd get one.





--
http://www.bootdisk.com/

Oldus Fartus wrote:
I use a 1.44M floppy to keep a record of my stock portfolio. Of course
one couldn't do that using Excel. I use SuperCalc5, and the complete
portfolio weekly updates for a year, (52 spreadsheets), fit on one floppy.
There are a total of 48 line items with 13 columns each, plus a 15 line
summary. 52 weeks fit on one floppy including summaries for the past five
years and a weekly line graph of total portfolio value. Floppies aren't too
small--our programs and data files have just grown too big.

It's also handy to have a floppy to boot into DOS or Linux to unravel file
problems when Windows won't boot. I realize that you can do most of this
with a CD, but you'll meet a lot of computers that can't boot from CDs.
(I do have some basic Linux and DOS programs on a bootable CD, but it's
easier to juggle files on a floppy to make specialized boot disks.)

My first floppies were 5 1/4" single sided, single density holding all of
110K, so I'm happy with 1.44M. Incidently they cost about $5 each. I'm
just sorry that AOL quit sending out free floppies that could be formatted.

For a while, I'll keep my floppy drives! Both A: and B:

Virg Wall
--
A foolish consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds,........
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Microsoft programmer's manual.)

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On Sat, 13 Dec 2003 04:40:41 GMT, V W Wall <vwall@DEADearthlink.net>
wrote:

But floppies are so unreliable - literally it goes bad by the time you
go over to your neighbor to help out. In such cases I take at least
three identical floppies :-)

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John wrote:
Basically if your system is USB bootable...there is no need for one
anymore...unless you use DOS, and unless you blah blah blah...many other
reasons. You have yours...think about it for your purposes.

--
Night_Seer

Ardent wrote:

Nonsense. If you look after them, store them properly and use known
good disks, then they are reliable. If you have to make three copies
of something to make sure you get one good one, then I would suggest
either your drive or your disks are faulty.

It hasn't been a reliability problem which has caused people to stop
using them, but a lack of capacity in the media. 1.44 meg just is
nowhere big enough these days for many people. (There are exceptions
of course, as Virg has said - he has a need for them, and it suits his
purposes.)

--
Cheers
Oldus Fartus

Oldus Fartus <denisand@netNOSPAMspace.net.au> wrote in news:broinm$2s3e$1
@otis.netspace.net.au:

I don't know about reliability now. I have a few CDs I burned like 2 years
ago that are still fine, while the accompanying floppies that were packaged
in the same place (in a plastic box on a bookshelf, no exposure to light or
heat) are bad. The floppies were aquired earlier than the CDs by about 3
months, but were unused until I burnt the discs.

I'm not saying floppies are unreliable entirely, just that comparing the
lifespan of a floppy to the lifespan of a CD is like comparing the lifespan
of a rabbit to a human.

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"DeMoN LaG" <n@a> wrote in message
news:Xns9454BF872D1EWobbly@216.168.3.30...
I have two large boxes of floppies that havent seen usage since 1998 or so,
and they are still readable. I got them off the shelf, dusted off the
covers, opened the boxes, and every one I put in the drive was still good.
Every disc had data stored on it several years ago, and they were ok.

DeMoN LaG wrote:

Interesting. As I said earlier in this thread, I very rarely use
floppies, and haven't bought any for probably five or six years.

I did pull out some old ones today after your post though, and they were
all readable, so perhaps it is the later ones which are suffering from
reliability problems.

--
Cheers
Oldus Fartus

Thor wrote:
in 1996 for 'high-clip' floppies so I bought 100 of them. Formatted
them, put some files on them, and put them away along with 100 or my
regular floppies. Each year I brought out 20 of each & checked to see
how many were still good. It turned out that the high-clip floppies did
work better. Still not perfect, but the failure rate after 5 years was
less than 2% vs. almost 20% for my 'bargain' floppies.

Of course by the time the results were in I had little if any need for
floppies. That's the problem with performing longevity tests in a
rapidly-changing environment.

DeMoN LaG wrote:
Just don't stick them on the refrigerator with a magnet! ;=)

Virg Wall
--
A foolish consistency is the
hobgoblin of little minds,........
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Microsoft programmer's manual.)

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On Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:32:12 +0800, Oldus Fartus
<denisand@netNOSPAMspace.net.au> wrote:

I am using floppies from the 8 inch age and I posted my experience. I
have in fact hundreds of no-read floppies and give them to kids to
make pen stands and what not :-)

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