That damned floppy drive

D

Dreamwill

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I seldom use a floppy drive (seldom may or may not mean never). Is it reallythat important ? I've read somewhere that Windoze does a constant check on the floppy for new media. wont that query take up processing speed ?

And Doesnt the fact that its constantly plugged in to the main power source and always on, take up some of my power ?

I'm thinking I can unplug it alltogether and gain back some of that processing speed and power, but I'm not sure its worth the hassle. anyone have input on that ?
 
It uses very little power and windows only looks at it if you push in a floppy. You can turn off the boot up floppy check in your bios and save maybe 5 seconds of boot time.

If it makes you feel better about pulling the plug - One of the big PC makers (Dell?) stopped including floppies as a waste of money.

You can make a boot up recovery floppy for windows 2000 or XP but I've never seen a use for one. I haven't had a use for the floppy except for flashing my motherboard bios and XP can do that from windows now.
 
Hrm ... well that wont help me much in my upping the performances on my slug of a machine.

I'm stuck with a 333 Celeron, 192 Mb RAM, 16 Mb Voodoo3, and two crappy hard drives, totaling 12Gb ;__;

craptacular.

my Windows 2K setup boots up at a record time of 2 full minutes.
 
i dont even build them with them anymore and always disable it in bios :happy:
 
My laptop doesn't have a floppy drive.
CD-RW does the job :happy:
 
I agree with you guys,

I haven't had one in my towers since I bought XP and saw that everything I needed was included in the XPCD.


Heeter
 
also, if you don't wanna disconnect it for fear of needing to use it later, you could just disable it in the device manager. i think that does just about the same thing. haven't entirely tested it yet.
 
i never use a floppy drive for almost 2 years...
i'm using handy drive... ;)
 
Originally posted by Dreamwill
Hrm ... well that wont help me much in my upping the performances on my slug of a machine.

I'm stuck with a 333 Celeron, 192 Mb RAM, 16 Mb Voodoo3, and two crappy hard drives, totaling 12Gb ;__;

craptacular.

my Windows 2K setup boots up at a record time of 2 full minutes.

My first system was that setup and it rocked:) i overclocked that celeron upto 415mhz fsb@83mhz and i was so pleased at the time and it was so easy to do and i never had a problem.
 
and what happens to everyone without floppies who need to flash there BIOS :huh:
 
I've used my floppy twice in the last 12 month

1. flashed dvd rom > regionless
2. low level format > get rid of a bad sector

the rest of the time its disabled in device manage

I like it disabled because > I access my files through a toolbar to my computer > if I accidently hover the mouse over floppy my machine chugs while it checks the drive,

:cool:
 
Originally posted by GoNz0
and what happens to everyone without floppies who need to flash there BIOS :huh:

my mobo came with a bios flash utility > the bios is downloaded & flashed while on-line & reboot to finish the job

:cool:
 
yeh my asus does that, but i dont trust it after it installed the wrong bios in my mates A7V333 that was a fun recovery :D and i needed a floppy to do it LOL
 
I tend to put a floppy drive in PCs purely because I can never be sure if I'll need one in the future or not. Plus, they're only about £5 nowadays anyway. As for performance issues... I've never noticed it accessing all the time... just turn off floppy seek in the BIOS - that'll speed up boot.

My mums old 433 celeron (now my TV box) had a floppy drive in. It doesnt now, but then again, its only for watching divx and dvds on the TV, so I only need a DVD drive (which it has - albeit a crap one).

I suppose its upto you if you need it or not. I'd personally keep it in just incase though
 
I flashed my bios after creating a boot cdrom which you can do using nero.....exactly the same as a boot floppy !.

Took 5 mins to create.
 
Originally posted by BonyTony
I flashed my bios after creating a boot cdrom which you can do using nero.....exactly the same as a boot floppy !.

Took 5 mins to create.

didnt know you could do that

nice one :D

:cool:
 
The only reason to have a floppy is to support legacy hardware. I work in an electronics test lab. Some of our oscilloscopes and other equipment have floppies to record test data. The only way to conveniently move the data to the desktop is to copy onto floppy and call it up in Excel for plotting.

Floppies may be ancient, but they're in so many other machines that they're almost self-perpetuating. Other than networking our test equipment, which is very inconvenient if you want portability, the only answer is floppy for now.

Some day, USB will be the way to go since everyone is getting these little USB flash drives. They are as convenient as floppies, but hold many times more data. You can even boot from them if you have your system files on it.

Floppies will probably be around for a long time to come. They are the appendix of the computer. Enjoy the life.
 
Originally posted by BonyTony
My first system was that setup and it rocked:) i overclocked that celeron upto 415mhz fsb@83mhz and i was so pleased at the time and it was so easy to do and i never had a problem.

Oddly enough, I've tried that eons ago, but the BIOS wont let me do it. everytime I set it at a higher speed, its sets it back to the original speed. really farking frustrating.
 
Originally posted by GoNz0
and what happens to everyone without floppies who need to flash there BIOS :huh:

I use Intel boards and they have the traditional floppy flash but also have a express flash, runs in windows
run it, let it go.... reboot, finishes. waa laa:D
 
Originally posted by Dreamwill
I seldom use a floppy drive (seldom may or may not mean never). Is it reallythat important ? I've read somewhere that Windoze does a constant check on the floppy for new media. wont that query take up processing speed ?

And Doesnt the fact that its constantly plugged in to the main power source and always on, take up some of my power ?

I'm thinking I can unplug it alltogether and gain back some of that processing speed and power, but I'm not sure its worth the hassle. anyone have input on that ?

It’s an odd thing these floppy’s (drive A & B). Because of the way PC BIOS’s are designed and the fact that these two drive letters are hard wired in the Bios itself at the lowest level, if you ever encounter a problem with flashing the Bios (by whatever means) the BIOS’s last line of defence if the humble A drive (floppy). Even with a corrupt Bios, the A drive can sometimes (nearly always) be accessed to re-flash the Bios and hence correct the problem. Support for bootable CD’s etc does not get loaded until the end of the procedure. Maybe its time to hardwire drive A to the CD drive and drive B to the floppy drive. However this could lead to many problems even with modern (XP) operating systems that are designed to treat BIOS drives (not translated drives) or drives not requiring driver support. So yes you could use a CD as the “A” drive but it must conform to the old tracks/sectors of the last drive to be hard-wired into the Bios (1.44Mb).

This would “free up” drives A and B but would mean a re-compile of all operating systems as these drives cannot be mapped to other devices. This will happen but not yet.
 

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