Dell Saying Goodbye to Floppy Disk Drives

[Blane]

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2185639

[catachresis]

It's all fun and games until you need to safely flash the bios.

-- Or that bootable cd isn't successfully detected.

-- Or your six-year-old daughter brings a floppy home from school, or your maiden aunt wants to print-up the genealogy she contrived on her cute little pentium she works on at home.

-- Or you just want to store some small docs and applets on a medium you know is dumb enough to be accessible on any old computer -- UNTIL NOW.

Pish, I just bought a new box of floppies - Nature's Disposable Computer Medium. Vivre le Floppy!

[LTR12101B]

I still have a 5 1/4" drive as well, and a Ditto 3200 tape drive

Seriously, though, the floppy has been overtaken by developments - just think about backing up to floppy, or how few of todays bloated word processor files would fit on one, or the size of a software distribution - though there ARE some excellent programs which would fit on a single floppy.

The floppy-interfaced tape drive is little better - hellishly slow!

I'd be lost without the odd boot floppy though!


Of course, the other thing slowly creeping in is the "legacy free motherboard" - no PS/2 mouse/keyboard, no serial or parallel, everything USB.

[Blane]

All these companies are always in the rush for change and the almighty dollar. This is the only reason for them to want to get rid of floppy drives. I really don't think that alot of people will want any of these systems.

[catachresis]

Hey Blane, the problem is that many of the neophytes who typically purchase their systems from Dell won't know about the occasions when floppies are useful and/or necessary. Indeed, many of them may think of the floppy drive as an intimidatingly archaic piece of legacy-ware that they'd eradicate from their computer-lives entirely -- like the DOS operating system, for instance. Dell CSRs will be happy to point-out how unnecessary the expense is as well. Then the day comes when they can't do something without a floppy. Dell Service and Support will be of neither and will provide none.

They'll come crawling and crying to a forum like this one, and some smart-aleck (not me!) will sneer, "Hey, get a floppy drive!"

[roadworker]

Originally posted by catachresis
They'll come crawling and crying to a forum like this one, and some smart-aleck (not me!) will sneer, "Hey, get a floppy drive!"

LOL....
Norton Ghost=uses floppy to backup/restore a whole system
Norton antivirus rescue= needs 4 floppies
Win 98/ME=can boot with floppy
safe way to flash firmware = uses floppy
System Commander = rescue files on floppy
Partition Magic/bootMagic = rescue files on floppy



Just a few examples.......IMHO,I think that Dell company is managed by idiots....

[Blane]

LOL, Then the'll all be looking to buy external floppy drives.

[LTR12101B]

The CD-RW is, I suppose, taking over as a bootable and backup drive, BUT:

In boot mode, you can't write!
And some miserable jerks expect you to run a CD-RW on the native WinXP facilities, and do not provide software capable of making a bootable CD.

USB pendrives/ card readers are generally not usable as boot media.

Now whatever happened to all the "better than floppy" drives that were (possibly) bootable (with bios support), and had worthwhile capacity.

One time, the Zip drive looked favourite, and was an original fitment on some PC ranges - but the unreliability of the media and drives - "Click of Death" put paid to that.

The LS120, I liked - especially as it combined standard floppy, and high capacity in one.
Sony, had another - HiFD, that looked great on it's statistics, but seems to be vapourware.

Main problem with all the "floppy-like" devices - horrendously expensive media of only 20, 100, 120, 250 Mb capacity.

[jorel]

i'm with you all!

[daveml]

floppy drives are dirt cheap and can get u out of big s$%t!
I agree with roadworkers opinion of Dell too.

[Wedge]

Originally posted by catachresis
Hey Blane, the problem is that many of the neophytes who typically purchase their systems from Dell won't know about the occasions when floppies are useful and/or necessary.

That's exactly who Dell is counting on.

I cannot tell you how many times I have gone to big retail outlets and listened to the employees pitch at newbies. And it works. These customers know nothing except what they are being told. The word floppy means nothing to them and that is NOT an exaggeration. It doesn't take much to sell either, because the customer is already prepared to buy one. They just need some employee to tell them which one it is they should purchase. They can easily dupe newbies into beleiving they will need x, y, and z features for their computer. Hell, they could make it up as they go along.

So, catachresis is spot on. Dell is banking on next generation newbies. Their going to psyche the customer into beleiving a floppy is an old, useless peice of equipment, should the customer have enough sense to inquire about them.

[The-poacher]

wedge i too love to hear the sales crap from the peeps in tiny or pc world could sell u a spectrum if u didnt no better.
I love to see people with the trolley with all their new gear PC/ printer / scanner etc & I always think

"When U learn U will know U have been conned & U wont buy your second PC here unless U are a complete idiot"



PS Dell are clueless >> floppy drives may be old but as per Daveml when U in de KaKa U need one.

[Oldy]

Gotta agree with all on this. I always image a PC to allow for some pratt deleting the system, or worse - installing Real Player

A buds client couldn't understand why I still wanted to include floppy drives so I gave him a quick demo by removing the half of the system32 directory and then left him to it. When I came back he had reinstalled W2K (had taken about an hour) but still couldn't get Office to run without blowing up.

To prove my point - I switched the PC off, rebooted via a floppy and restored the fully functional image in under 15 mins.

He pointed out quite correctly I could have used a boot CD to the same effect but eventually agreed that could only work assuming the CD was functional....to illustrate my point I was demonstating how the drive tray couldn't support much weight...

The biggest fear I have is that Dell carry a lot of clout with Intel -
I hope they continue to offer floppy support on their systemboards...

[elpresidente]

seems that u all need a floppy ?! u can have mine, it is like new cause I haven´t used it since years....
I don´t even have a disk ...lol...

greetz

[Fox Mulder]

Ditto. I never had trouble booting from a CD and I flash BIOS/Firmware from the hard disk, because the floppy disks are a very unreliable, slow and expensive media, at least in my country one box of 10 FD units = 20 U$S and you can hardly find a brand that will resist more that 2/3 uses per disk(crappy quality FD's). Each one to his own, I guess. Anyway I don't hate legacy hardware as much as Doom9 for example(those who read the news at his site will know what I mean)*, though, I agree that old legacy interfaces such as PS/2 and serial/parallel ports slow things down and i'ts better to use the USB counterparts if you can. I think Macintosh moved away from legacy long ago. I still keep the floppy drive from my first computer(Intel 486 DX4) that still works good and it was the first and will be the last floppy disk drive I will ever use in my life. But I keep it more for nostalgic than logic or usefull reasons. BTW this is all IMHO.


*This is what he wrote in his Win XP article as well. I especially agree that for small files of 1,38 MB you better use e-mail or a CD-RW, all the people I know is doing this, even on my poor country:

"And a final word about hardware: With WinXP more than ever you should think about going legacy free. That means, no more ISA cards, no more serial and parallel connectors, no floppy drives, etc. I have dumped my old 3.5" floppy drives more than a year ago, files that are smaller than such a disc can be sent via email in the broadband age, and larger files require some other means of transport anyway. I still like the ZIP drives but these days you may be better off going for a burner directly." "When it comes to periphery stuff make sure that they come with an USB interface, or Firewire. Most Scanners, Printers, Mice and Keyboards have an USB interface and if you've once seen the plug&play facilities of that interface you know why changing makes sense. Just an example: While my Windows XP is running, I start the printer and plug in the USB cable. Windows detects the new device, installs the driver and now I can print in the program that I had already open prior to plugging in the printer. No longer do you have to reboot when you connect/reconnect a device to your PC (within reason, if there's no drivers you will have to install them before you can use the device for the very first time and here it depends on how well the driver was written if a reboot is required). I still use some PS2 hardware but eventually I will dump that as well. The serial and parallel ports are already turned off in the BIOS. And, of course, ISA is also legacy. If you still have ISA cards you should consider dumping them, and there's hardly any new mainboard still having ISA slots anyways." "Also, if you read the recent Comdex coverage you can see that hardware manufacturers are really steering into that direction. Next year we'll see many more computer that only have USB2 and Firewire ports for external hardware."