Building PC, to floppy or not to floppy?

I'm considering not putting a floppy drive in my new computer. I have a LAN
and the other computers have floppies. Anyone see a reason why I should
include one? Thanks.
-- Scott

 

Dr Teeth a écrit:
....

.................................................without floppy DD

I use my floppy DD often for Maxtor PowerMax, IBM DFT, memtest... and
even with the good ol' W98 boot disk!

Roy

 

I second the 2 above.

Additionally I can tell this:

My friend insists on not having a need for floppy and he hasn´t got one
installed.
I happen to own a spare one which I keep in my desk. My friend there and
others have to bite the apple from time to time to borrow it.
You need a floppy.

The stupidest thing I´ve heard of are those Abit mobos without serial and
PS2. What do people do if they need to access their DSL modem via management
cable?
And a normal external 56K modem cannot be used without serial.

Best to have it all installed. Costs next to nothing.

 

Failsafe BIOS upgrades...

 

Failsafe BIOS upgrades...

 

Dr Teeth:

No True. there are Floppy controller based tape drives. good only for Win9x/ME
however but its worth noting.

Dave

| They are cheap and you never know when you may need one...when you
| cannot go out and buy one. Also, AFAIK, nothing else can be connected
| to the floppy connector on the motherboard.

 

It's possible to build a PC without a floppy that is internal. Most
motherboards today support USB floppy. Thats what I use. I got Teac USB
floppy. As for PS/2 keyboard and mouse - these are all emulated through the
USB ports. You no longer need PS/2 ports. And you don't need serial ports
either as USB takes care of that. There are USB drivers for DOS that let you
take advantage of a mouse and keyboard or other USB devices. I try to avoid
DOS as much as possible. Crossing my fingers I haven't used it in the last 6
months. The onlything I need DOS is for Symantec Ghost 2003 which by the way
supports USB and firewire now. Do I use a PS/2 keyboard, mouse or serial
devices anymore? NOPE! All gone. Never had a problem. Although I keep my
USB floppy around in a bag somewhere. And it works just like an internal
floppy to boot! My .02

Matt

 

BTW. For a true USB solution - use a flash card reader and boot from it!
Thats what I do most of the time. The 1.44MB size of a floppy is not
important when booting with a CompactFlash card. As a matter of fact my boot
CF card is 256MB! Do you need a floppy nowadays? No.

 

yeah..generally, you don't need a floppy... but, you'd probably feel better
having one..just in case
you need to boot off one, or make a floppy with something on it for someone
else... if you stay in your
own world..then, not much need for a floppy drive... so long as you have an
alternative boot device to
your hard disk.

jeff

 

I agree with the "don't need". On my own computers I have barely used a
floppy in a couple of years. I do all BIOS flashes from the HD in safe mode.
Frankly, my favourite device for replacing the floppy is the USB thumb
drive. If you have a recent BIOS, you can boot from any USB mini drive as
well. Now that they are so cheap everybody should have one.

64-128MB for around 35-45 dollars CAN...
http://www.canadacomputers.com/storage.html#usb
64MB for $14.99 US, the same as a floppy!
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Category/category_slc.asp?CatId=900

Same price, way faster, can hold 50x the data and the drive is portable. Now
that's a good argument

bye, Rick

 

There are quite a few reasons that pop into my mind to have a floppy drive
installed, however, the choice is yours.
If you can afford the $15 put one in.

 

I haven't used one in almost 4 years, there is nothing you need it for.

 

That was a great idea, shedding useless and archaic ports. A shame they
abandoned it.

 

Wrong. There are situations where you might need it. I still have to
use mine occasionally.

 

Name one.

 

Adding 3rd party hard disk drivers or raid drivers during setup
System recovery using partition magic, nortons, others.

 

You can add the drivers to a custom WinXP CD. In fact, this is the
smart way to do it since you can add all your drivers, plus you can set
the switches so that you don't have to babysit the install.

Partition Magic will recover from the install CD. Ghost is crap unless
you do enterprise deployment, but the image disc itself is bootable.

 

I have PM, Drive Image, Ghost etc on a bootable cd-rom.

But I have a client who sends me her a/cs and payroll on a floppy disk.

 

<sarcasm>Yes, you did.</sarcasm> Did I say he was building a laptop? I was
citing an example for a situation in which a floppy drive is useful. It's a
good fallback low-tech solution for certain data transfer situations.

 

Laptops are different, and not really relevant here. For a laptop that
interfaces with a variety of systems then yes, possibly, a floppy is
useful. But not on a desktop.