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Dell Dropping The Floppy
adambwells writes "Dell wants to stop including floppy drives as standard hardware on its Dimension line of desktops, and will start this practice later this quarter, as reported in this Yahoo article. Says Dell's product marketing: We would like to see customers migrate away from floppies as quickly as possible, because there are better alternative technologies out there ... it's an antique technology. At some point, you've got to draw the line. You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago." They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
One of the main reasons for doing this is support: floppy drives result in people having broken machines and lost data. Back in 1996-7 when I helped support a high school's computers, 75% of the hardware problems on the Dells and 100% of the hardware problems on the Macs were with floppy drives, and most of the other problems we had to deal with were people who had lost their paper by trying to rewrite a floppy disc too many times (people still think a floppy disc can last for a whole semester!). The next year when Apple dropped the floppy disc, we never had a hardware problem with the new Macs; it's easy to see why Dell wants to do the same: you can instantly cut support costs drastically and increase customer satisfaction.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I believe that statement is a bit aggressive. I think it was only three years ago that Apple dropped the floppy drive for the New Bondi iMac. This is according to Apple-History.com anyway ... I fully agree with the move but the consumers seemed to be upset - especially in the business world. Zip is not a viable alternative and SuperDisk wasn't marketted well enough.
It hasn't been until recently that CD-R / RW was streamlined enough for the 'common user', and the prices were affordable. I like the idea of USB "keychain storage", but those devices are still rather expensive.
Everything I do is on CD or on a network share these days anyway. I believe there will soon come a time that removable media is irrelivant. I would like to see hardware manufacturers and distributers put together a system where the bios gives you options for a TCP/IP stack and netbooting and there are Internet based boot servers. From there you could do anything you needed across a network.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Someone was first, with an item called the "iMac" 4.5 years ago...
Can I boot from a USB drive? And what about all of those install disks I still get? Hard Drive manufacturers still have their disk setup programs based on a floppy disk install.
The same line of questioning was levelled at Apple back in '98 when they dropped the floppy. That nincompoop Dvorak insisted (and still insists, last I checked) that losing the floppy drive would be the death of Apple.
If Dell drops the floppy, manufacturers of hardware will stop providing install disks on floppies. They will ensure that their BIOS supports booting from a USB drive. I know this to be true because Dell didn't get to be a big successful company by being stupid, and because we done already did this with Apple.
-Waldo Jaquith
why waste a cd for a file smaller than 1.44 megs?
Cheapest 50 pack of 3.5" floppies on pricewatch: $11 shipped.
Cheapest 50 pack of CD-Rs on pricewatch: $11 shipped.
What exactly are you wasting? "It just seems wrong somehow"?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
PS/2 <-> USB converter.
Get a print server for your old printers (two-ports can be had for under $100, and networking them is a snap), and buy a CD-RW drive. ZIP drives are slow, kludgy, low-capacity, and have a tendency to click your media (and drive) to death at a seemingly random time (usually disk 13 of 26 is the victim). Moreover, probably 95% or more of home and office computers have CD-ROM drives of some form or another, which makes CD-R/RW discs far more portable than the very, very slim market share of ZIP drives. CD-RW drives can be had brand-new for about $75CDN and can burn 900MB worth of data to a disc in approximately 1 minute 30 seconds. 900MB discs can be had for about $0.50CDN, 800MB CD-RW discs can be had for about $3CDN or less. How much does a 100 or 250MB ZIP disk cost, again?
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
Becauses the busses are slow, kludgy, and cost sillicon and valuable board real-estate that could be used for UATA133 or additional USB 2.0 (450+ MB/Sec) or IEEE1394 / FireWire (400+ MB/Sec) connectors, or to make motherboards smaller and/or less expensive.
I'll assume you've got some figures to support this otherwise baseless claim?
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
The big problem I have with floppies (really the only since I hardly ever use them) is the way they essentially tie up a computer. They bring your system to a grinding halt while they are accessing.
That's an artifact of your OS.
Back in the early 90's OS/2 had no problems multitasking floopy I/O - I recall formating a few hundred floppies while doing other stuff, with absolutely no degredation in performance of other tasks.
I've only formatted a floppy once under XP, so I don't recall how it handled it. Win9x did not handle it well though, which is an artifact of still being built off of DOS.
I don't believe Linux or other Unix-based systems have issues multitasking the floppy.
Try Part #CL0014 I think Microcenter sells a similar device-- probably stocked in the Mac section. I haven't used such devices, so I have no idea if they work well.
Last time I tried to install XP without a floppy drive in the system it would hang during the hardware detection (the quick one at the very begging of every NT/XP boot up sequence). The odd thing was it would boot/detect just fine if I enabled floppy support in the bios without attaching the floppy drive.
This sig is worse than my last.
Bootable CDs will flash BIOS just fine (it's how I flashed my BIOS). Motherboard manufacturers are also allowing BIOS flash in Windows.
They're not exactly easily accessible as they are at an angle (dunno why) and slightly recessed, but they are there. If you stuff your PC under the desk, I suggest keeping a USB extension cable plugged into one of the ports and plugging your USB key into the cable.
There are a few that I've seen, for example, ABIT's MAX series of boards.
For the record, NT, 2k and XP have no issues multitasking with a floppy either.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I just don't understand this mentality of "let's get rid of it because it's old". Come on people, the keyboard is much older technology than the floppy drive. I don't hear anyone bitching about how we need to scrap that "ancient" technology.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and sure as hell don't throw it away!
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
A Win9x trick.
Format the floppy in a DOS prompt, and you can still multitask fine.
Because you haven't searched on Google for "LinuxBIOS".
--
est modus in rebus
There is nothing you can do with a floppy disk that you can't theoretically do with a cd
How about writing to them on the cheapest computers? The most inexpensive PCs still come with CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives, not CD-RW drives.
How about writing to them while listening to an audio disc? Most computers have only one CD drive.
How about booting from them on old computers? Many old computers' BIOS don't support booting from a CD-ROM drive.
How about making a bootable CD at all? When Roxio Easy CD Creator 4 makes an El Torito boot image, it does the equivalent of a 1440 KB 'dd' from drive A:. I don't know how other tools for Windows work because I haven't bought them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes there is. You have a disk with ten text files on it. You want to edit one of them, andding one paragraph to it, then save it. With a floppy, you can do just that - it behaves like a small filesystem. If those ten files are in an ISO 9660 image on a CD, you'll have to recreate the whole image to get the one change to the one file onto the disk.
Then add on top of that the fact that while both floppies and CD-RW's allow re-writes, CD-RW's can't handle nearly as many rewrites as a floppy can.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Like in DOS/Windows:Buffered:I prefer the buffered variant. You still have to unmount it in any case, and when you do things like customizing floppy distributions being able to add/delete files, some of which might not fit, without a delay can be very nice.