I went without a floppy drive for a year or so, until I dug an replacement unti out of a scrap computer. Aside from rare special reboots involving repairing or ghosting a hard drive, the only time I ever use the drive is to transfer small files between computers, and even that’s not often.
As a result, I haven’t bought new floppy disks in years and my existing supply is slowly deteriorating. Except for the rare driver floppy disk that comes with new hardware, the newest disk I have is at least 5 years old. I occasionally go through them, looking for old files and games. I still have a copy of Civilization One somewhere. I just hope it’s still readable, if I ever feel in a retro mood.
My floppy drive has also been broken for a while now. It might have broken 6 months ago, when I noticed it, or maybe longer, since I don’t think I’ve used the floppy drive in a year and a half.
I’ve also put together a computer and formatted the HD, and installed Win2K all without a floppy drive.
As far as transferring files goes, I just FTP it to my web server and download it when I need to. A heck of a lot less of a chance of corruption, strangely enough.
Another vote for shuttling files between shcool and home. ~ The only read/write media drive common to all the computers on campus is the floppy drive, and asignments and projects are sized accordingly. - DougC
In which case you’re left with a more awkward, slower, and more hassling solution. Who wants to open up Nero every time you want to make a >1 megabyte file on a 700 megabyte CD?
I could not be floppy-less for long. Lots of text documents, requiring frequent updates, that have to be openable, modifiable and saveable in whatever system is available when I get to where I need to do the work: some systems with no (or the wrong size) ZIP; some with no CD-RW burner or the wrong software; some not on the network at all, never mind capable of sharing.
As I am not likely to create anything that will not fit on a 1.44M disk (or heck, that would not fit on a 720K disk!), the little fellers serve me well.
In my job (tech support)? All the time. I’ve made bootable CDs but have never run across a BIOS flash update “makedisk” program that says “Please insert one formatted CD-R and press Enter”. And most HD diagnostic progs come on floppies as well (although I suppose you could make a bootable CD from the floppy but that seems like such a waste of space).
I’ll admit for the average non-tech geek there isn’t much use for them anymore, but this still isn’t a CD only world yet, as some of the previous posts had indicated. Technically speaking, the OP title asks if there is still a point to 3.5 drives, not just floppies, and I would keep one installed (or at least stashed in a drawer somewhere) on my PC on the off chance that someone gives me a doc to view/edit/print on floppy.
