You can help make longhorn better!

i haven't built a box with a floppy drive for 5 years yet still have to keep one around purely for this purpose so please please please get rid of this anachronism. Surely the int and the bus it connects to should be deprecated

didn't the PC99 spec suggest removing the floppy drive interface or am i remembering wrong?
 
floppies are annoying media, i do keep a FD installed for installs but it dosent get its own faceplate to be ugly to the world. i mounted it on the wall inside the case so if i need to use it i have to remove the side of my case.

Down with floppies! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy
 
Ok, there's tons of stuff that I have seen over the years in the development of the Windows operating system that I would love to have changed. But, I will try and limit my my expressive rant to the topic at hand.

Absolutely, Microsoft should ditch any requisite of loading anything from the floppy drive. The idea that Intel and other major OEM's said back in 1999 that the floppy drive was on the way out, and here we are in 2005 still loading SCSI and SATA and RAID drivers off of an extremely antiquated piece of technology is utterly ridiculous. I can still get a 5.25" floppy drive if I want to, but I'm not going to use it to run anything. The mere idea of using technology developed more than a decade ago to enable the use of a mass storage controller that hosts on it the latest, fastest, most cutting edge technology so that my operating system can be installed makes me want to choke some software engineers, or whoever decided to do that. It's beyond dumb, and it needs to go.

My second gripe is you know how sometimes when you install a new piece of hardware, and it has more than one device on it that Windows detects, but it doesn't give you any clue as to what the different devices are? For instance, you've installed a piece of hardware that you're digging for the driver cd for, and you boot up XP, and it asks you for a driver CD, but either you don't have the CD in the drive yet, haven't found it (and will therefore have to download the drivers), or better yet, you have the driver CD in the CD-ROM, but it only has an install.exe, and no INF files to point the Windows Device Detection Wizard to? So you press cancel, and then go to Device Manager, and now you've got several things listed with either yellow exceptions, or the ubiquitous question mark and "Unknown Device." You'd think that Windows should be able to query the chipset or the device and leave some sort of reference under Device Manager as to whether this device that I'm looking at is the Gameport on my sound card, or the Firewire port. Son of a bitch! /rant off
 
Ive been building pcs for years now and I ALWAYS put in a floppy - no matter what.

why not? They are 10 bucks, you have slots for them on your case, ports on your mobo.

Yea they are slow and out dated, but it adds that much needed insurance just incase you forget your USB drive at home (or forgot your keys, etc) and need to get a word doc off a pc at school or a library.

I just dont see why it is such a big issue.

That being said, it would be nice not to have to do that - more options are better, aren't they?

Vote for USB drive and/or floppy install option

::Hugs my spare floppy::
 
fuelvolts said:
Ive been building pcs for years now and I ALWAYS put in a floppy - no matter what.

why not? They are 10 bucks, you have slots for them on your case, ports on your mobo.

Yea they are slow and out dated, but it adds that much needed insurance just incase you forget your USB drive at home (or forgot your keys, etc) and need to get a word doc off a pc at school or a library.
Click to expand...
Cheap? Yes. Reliable? NO! I have seen enough people get screwed over by dying floppy disks to NEVER trust one again. I would say that there is no plausible reason to have them anymore. Either get a USB key for personal use, or even email the documents to yourself. I know you have Gmail ;). One more vote for KILL THE FLOPPY DRIVE.
 
Well Ive got a floppy but never use it. Why doesnt MS just do a VALVE and have it all on download..... they must have what, a zillion servers???? that way you could pick and choose drivers etc..... oh well if not then a nice little CD with all the drivers in the world would be nice. I dont have any usb things yet nor do I want them. It like many other things would get lost or eaten by the dog.
 
i hope i never run into on the street man. i've been a tech for over 10 years, and i've never seen a piece of technology more unreliable in reading media, no technology that reads slower, or makes more noise than a floppy drive. It's the only media that I have ever worked with that you can format on one PC, transfer files to, and then take it to another computer, put the disk in the drive, and have it say "This disk is not formatted. Would you like to format it now?" And don't even get me started on Iomega Zip Disks. The legacy of the floppy should be just that. A legacy. Like ISA, EISA, 16bit cpu's, 4mb of system ram, and Packard Bells modem/sound card idea. Bite me.
 
CD and USB is an obvious switch, the only reason i even use a floppy anymore is to install mass storage devices. i even update my bios with a cdrom now. You hafta wonder why microsoft is the farthest behind the power curve.
 
As said before ... Floppies are an outdated option. Many manufacturers charge extra for them or don't offer them at all on certain models.

One more vote for MS to move to a more current age CD/USB anything newer than Floppy.
 
Any solution to finally get rid of the last remaining reason for installing a floppy is great in my book.
 
badasspenguin said:
my god...this better be in Longhorn....floppies are DEAD.
Click to expand...
screw longhorn I want it in SP3. I only slipstream the service packs because different installs have different hardware and keys so I don't put drivers in. die floppy die
 
Thanks to the [H] crew for giving this the attention it deserves, and thanks to all of you who posted feedback. Hopefully This Longhorn chief over at Microsoft will feel swayed enough by your impassioned pleas to finally send the floppy to the pearly gates of hardware heaven.

We'll know sometime in the next several months when Beta1 of Longhorn ships out.
 
I'd love if MS set up the Longhorn install so that you could load drivers off a thumb drive or CD.
 
Yeap, floppy is death, please dont try that hard to support obsolete hardware!
MS if you are reading listen to what we have to say: Suport another media to LOAD drivers.
 
I worked as a system build and I always felt like a complete tool for having to tell customers that are buying this gigantic system they need to have a floppy so we can load drivers to install the OS. I also loved making calls to customers telling them they needed a floppy on the build after someone forgot to add one so we could load the mass storage controller drivers. Honestly the fact that this didn't stop at XP was bad enough if this carries over to longhorn thats just pure stupidity. This needs to end now.

NO MORE FLOPPIES!
 
One more vote for CD/USB loading of mass storage drivers, so I won't have to keep integrating RAID drivers into my CDs.
 
I work for a company (as a support technician) that sells servers to enterprise customers, this means webhosting companies, video storage customers, database and cluster environments... one of the biggest problems faced by these customer when choosing Windows as their OS, is the lack of support for installing drivers via any other means than a floppy drive.

Since a lot of our systems are compact (1U half depth units), often times the systems do not have a floppy drive, and since they buy multiple systems at a time, installations can be a real show stopper if they are a hassle to do...

Please add support for driver installs using CDroms, DVDs, or flash devices...

USB floppy support on most motherboards is shakey at best and I can't recall how many times I have seen support requests for help installing drivers in Windows, but I can count on my left hand how many times this has been a problem for our customers running an Unix based OS (RedHat, Suse, Solaris, etc...).

This is 2005 and you expect people to still _have_ floppy drives in their systems let alone making this the only way to install drivers?

This current method leaves the mind boggling for not only me but for pretty much any customer we have had that uses Windows as their OS of choice....

Please take this into consideration...
 
Why would Microsoft promote using the Floppy Drive --Over-- the USB and CD/DVD
interfaces to install drivers on its NEWEST MOST ADVANCED operating system?

Someone is nipping on the stash at Microsoft again.

Wouldnt everyone like to see the Floppy Drive just die?

CD/DVD should be required to support the average user

USB would be a dream for IT support people and the PC enthusiast.

GIve the people what they want MS, not what you think they want.
You'll make more money.
 
Add me to the list of people that want support for loading storage drivers by non-floppy means.

Creating a custom installation Windows CD should not be necessary just to install Window from scratch on a relative's new Dell (with an SATA hard drive and no floppy). That task took far more time than it should've.
 
I would love to see Microsoft include in the setup the ability to mount other drives (USB, additional HD, firewire, CD/DVD rom). It doesn't seem like it should be that difficult to pull off. Effectively the code is already in place to mount an HD for read/write and a cd/dvd rom for read, so why not just include in the Mass Storage driver section some code that allows for looking for additional drivers on those already mounted devices. The USB thing shouldn't be too hard to mount either, so really this shouldn't be an issue as Microsoft ought to just make the Mass Storage Driver installation section more versatile with the options they already have easily available. If the issue is the limited amount of ram on the minimum system that Longhorn is designed to run on, It might be useful for Setup to just prompt the end-user for the desired media format to look for the Mass Storage Drivers on. That way, Setup can use a simple script to load only the necessary drivers required to mount that specific media. After it finds the proper Mass Storage Driver, it can load it to memory and then promptly unload the specific driver for mounting that device and continue the installation.
 
There you sit with your 3-d halogram transmitting on your desk in vibrant color. Along with your Gigabyte dual video cards justa flying. Your 2 Terabyte HDD's are silent and running cool.

You plug in your 25 GIG Pen drive and download a legal movie on it while watching the nightly news on your 25 inch 2 MS LCD screen. Your young son comes up to you and says "Dad what's that funny little slot on the front of your computer? "Oh that's the floppy drive son, it holds 1.44 MEGABYTES of info." Why is this even an issue MS?
You might want to call your OS. "Longhorn 3.1" To offer floppy support as an option is one thing but to REQUIRE it?
 
Guys guys guys...consider this seriously, maybe it cost too much to use cd/dvd sata driver install. We need to consider M$ might not have enough money and simply cannot afford it.

Oh, wait... Put support for mass storage sata install in, now.
 
i can't believe its even being contemplated that the feature be dropped. the people that would most need this feature are the sys admins. why would microsoft want to alienate its most important people? we're the ones that actually pay for volume licensing with not only the operating system but office, its biggest money maker. its absurd enough that the feature isn't already implemented when it should be a very simple feature to code. i hate needing to keep around a floppy drive just for this stupid reason. finding a floppy disk is even harder to do, for me.
 
makes sense to me, im sick of hooking up a floppy to my system just to load that one driver
 
Having to use 1.44mb Floppy Disks in today's Mass storage world is stupid.

MS with your new OS there is no reason to hold on to this OLD tech, not when we have new stuff like USB sticks, CD's, DVD's.

Lose the 3.5 Inch Disk!
 
i haven't had a floppy drive in my system for about three years now, and even before that i RARELY used it...however i have had my USB key for about a year and i have been constantly using it for a LOT of things...in other words...DIE FLOPPY DIE!!!!

and why is that they didn't think to add basic SATA drivers in to SP2 anyway? kinda dumb if you ask me....
 
Why is this an issue.

Floppy should be dead already, get with the program MS.
 
For the love of God, let me forever disconnect this ugly abomination to computing.

(thumbdrive, CD, something that's not preceded by 'floppy')
 
For the love of baby jesus, get in the NOW age. If your going to force us to use the latest state of the art OS, don't make us use prehistoric tools to get it installed.

Mass storage/cd/dvd/Thumbdrive support gets my vote.

Don't fail at this. Many OEM"s don't even ship with floppy's anymore.
 
Count me in! Let us chose the source media. Personally I like the USB idea, it'll give me something to do with the 32MB thumbdrive I got in a Swag Bag at some convention...
 
Oh God yes Kill the Floppy! The only time I have ever needed to use the damn thing is when I reload with my SATA drives.
 
ir0nw0lf said:
Also, those complaining that floppy drives are obsolete, does that mean by extension that the following are also obsolete: serial ports, parallel ports, PS/2 ports?
Click to expand...


Yes that's what some of us mean. :D I use none of those in my current system, nor have I on the last 2 rigs...give me more USB 2.0 ports or Firewire...
 
if you got floppy problems maybe you need to try some viagra. check your email they sell it online now.


but seriously, who gives a crap about floppy drives. you should be more concerned with the DRM bullshit thats going to be included, the plan to make games run off the cd(no, not a cd check, i mean load like a console), the lack of winfs, little or no support/compliance for open standards ,more of the same crap everybody complains about now, etc, adn
 
MS is as MS does... So I guess they are a gigantous corporation that is bent on world domination... and the stomping of gnats such as linux and firefox...

CDs and USB drives would be nice for loading mass storage, drivers by the way...

...and a severe hatred for open source software... blah, blah, blah... etc., etc....
 
The whole installation process is getting an overhaul as far as I understand it, I can't believe that with the growing popularity of RAID and the declining popularity of floppies that MS won't address this.

Don't know if it's been mentioned yet (didn't read all 8 pages of this) but n-lite is a good option for integrating drivers. This can be done manually also with a bit of work. I manually integrated nforce3 raid drivers after a few tries and then found n lite which would have saved some time. x64 windows is another story, most sata drivers have problems being integrated manually or with n lite, but I believe this is because of the drivers themselves, not microsoft. I'm stuck now because my floppy controller is literally missing a couple pins so I cannot install x64 at all without breaking my RAID, which I don't have space to do.
 
As a system builder this would be very appreciated to have other options to load drivers from a source other than floppies.

Many servers, especially rack mount servers, do not come with floppies nor do they have positions in the case available for a standard floppy drive (or sometimes even a slim drive). For the first loading process this is not usually a big deal, because you usually have to case opened up and on the bench before it's install in a rack. But when something goes wrong down the road and you need to boot off a CD to run chkdsk or do a file repair you are stuck with pulling the thing out of a rack and installing a floppy drive temporarily.

Also, very few motherboard manufacturers ship floppies with the scsi/raid drivers that their board has integrated. They usually include it on the cd. Sometimes, documentation is very sparse and they include drivers for each and every motherboard they have that has scsi/raid integrated. So you're stuck with copying these drivers to floppy one at a time and trying to find the right driver.

The fact is that the front loader program for windows is the original loader program back from Windows NT. The only changes have been various file updates and more scsi/raid drivers bundled. The entire operations of the loader program is the same, you load drivers with a floppy, you partition, then you format. This is severely outdated and a slightly skilled programmer could update this in less then a few days.
 
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

scrap floppy support and Engineer will NOT be upgrading to Longhorn!!!!
just incase you dont thionk Engineers are important - no engineer so super duper hardware!!!!


Tek (and other big scope companies) are releasing scopes to this day (nice and fast as well) BUT will floppy disks, these floppies are used to take data off the scope to then examine to find problems

fuck it, let MS scap floppy support, it will result in Longhorn not being a suscess
 
I really think we need 8 more pages of " OMFG T3H FLOPPIE SUX0R0X0XR0R0XR0XR! !!!!!!OMFG111ELVELEN1111!!!!!11!1!OMG"
:rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Christ, I think everyone get's the point. Does anyone have a different suggestion?
 
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