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Dell Dropping The Floppy

Posted by timothy on from the drop-away dept.

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."

2 of 1,198 comments (clear)

  1. Re:"You wouldn't think of using a processor..." by Billly+Gates · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    "Heck, I'm still using hardware from the early 90's (10 years old), and it works fine. I'm not gonna blow money on something just because it's "new".



    Out of curiosity what kind of hardware do you use? Also what kind of software?

    I tend to agree with you on upgrading but my pentium III running gentoo or Windows2000 with 320 megs of ram with openoffice, winmysqladmin, mozilla, and palm desktop slow my machine down to mollasis during bootup. I upgraded to an athlon because they are so cheap today.

    I can't imagine using my fathers old 486dx-2 66mhz with 8 megs of ram today. This is what i used 10 years ago and impressed my friends( iwas only in high school then). It could run doom at over 30 fps! But today not even 1 os could run on it. I tried upgrading it but I have a defective motherboard that will not take it more then 8 megs of ram. Also I had a tiny 14 monitor that had a refresh rate of about 65 mhz at 640x480 and would hurt my eyes at anything above that. VGA only assuming X could even run on it.

    Unless your talking about ancient servers I can not see any use for old hardware unless its significantly upgraded. Even then kde would take like 5 minutes to load on it and a 340 meg hard drive would fill rather quickly on even the most minimalist linux installs.

    NetBSD is popular on older hardware because all the daemons are tiny. 8 megs of ram which was considered above the average amount back then(4 wa standard)could not even run console mode apps today. Deffinetly X is out of the question.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  2. Dell by Polo+monkey · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    When I ordered my Inspiron 8200 laptop 4 months back, it arrived with 2 floppy drives! (Instead of a CDRW)