PC World says farewell to floppy

[Kaytrim]

The Death of the old floppy disk is near at hand.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6314251.stm

[leapinlew]

that floppy has about 3-4 years of life yet.

To install SATA drivers you need a floppy drive - sure, Vista will fix that but I would expect another 3-4 years of XP use.

Does anyone else remember when floppies were fairly reliable? I remember having 2 floppies in my book bag all through college to store documents. Now, if I copy something to a floppy, I'm luck if it makes it across the room to a different computer.

[missioncontrol]

Does anyone else remember when floppies were fairly reliable? I remember having 2 floppies in my book bag all through college to store documents. Now, if I copy something to a floppy, I'm luck if it makes it across the room to a different computer.

man I'm doing some volunteer work fixing old donated PCs that are donated to Habitat for Humanity to be resold, and I end up having to make 5 or 6 boot disks before one actually works on a PC....

same way with drivers....

[Dartful Dodger]

I remember having 2 floppies in my book bag all through college to store documents. Now, if I copy something to a floppy, I'm luck if it makes it across the room to a different computer.

Across the room, I can't even go from desktop to laptop at the same desk.  I had to buy a flashdrive, because cd's with 1 meg files were getting wasteful.

Mac just stopped including floppy drives.  I thought Microsoft was using shock therapy to make us voluntarily stop.

[shmokes]

Yeah, their decline in demand has caused quality to fall through the floorboards.  Dell PCs still come with floppy drives by default when you're buying business class workstations.  I manually remove them from the configuration of my machines.  I pretty much do not allow my users to work with floppy disks.  I get some complaints, but they are better than the, "My computer won't read this disk and it's the only copy I have of such-and-such vital spreadsheet I've been working on for the last three months," ones.

[patrickl]

Well I had troubles moving things around on floppies back in the days too. Often the floppy would work only on the computer I used to write to it.

Trouble with floppy drives these days is that they never get used. When I'm called to repair a computer the floppy drive is usualy full of dust. A cleaning floppy often does help reviving these things.

Actually, I usually just create a bootable CD from a floppy. Works much better.

[jbox]

Actually, I usually just create a bootable CD from a floppy. Works much better.

Damn, I'd love to know how you make a CD out of a floppy?   

[danny_galaga]

that reminds me, i have my resume on a floppy. ive been meaning to do something with it but the bloody floppy drive on my machine pretty much NEVER worked...

[patrickl]

Actually, I usually just create a bootable CD from a floppy. Works much better.

Damn, I'd love to know how you make a CD out of a floppy?   

Sorry, how is that funny? I do that with Nero.

[ChadTower]

He means physically changing a floppy to a CD.

[Chris]

Actually, I usually just create a bootable CD from a floppy. Works much better.

Damn, I'd love to know how you make a CD out of a floppy?   

If you've never done it, the process of creating a bootable CD requires a bootable floppy to pull the boot files from.

[jbox]

He means physically changing a floppy to a CD.

Apparently the "wetting yourself laughing" smiley is no longer able to convey the "this was a stupid pun" subtext to the masses. 

[ChadTower]

If you've never done it, the process of creating a bootable CD requires a bootable floppy to pull the boot files from.

Or the image of a bootable floppy.  It can actually be done a number of ways but the burning app will need someplace to pull the boot files from because they aren't licensed to come in the burning app itself.

[patrickl]

If you've never done it, the process of creating a bootable CD requires a bootable floppy to pull the boot files from.

Or the image of a bootable floppy.  It can actually be done a number of ways but the burning app will need someplace to pull the boot files from because they aren't licensed to come in the burning app itself.

I forgot which software it was, but it came with a free version of DOS (not from M$) to create bootable disks yourself.