If you are reading this and there is no poll, FFS STOP REFRESHING THE FORUMS AND GET A LIFE. :downs:

Just a little poll to see how computer usage has changed in the past few years, as many PCs don't even have floppy drives anymore.

I'm on a laptop, which doesn't have a floppy drive. If it did, I probably wouldn't use it. I usually transfer files using my iPod if I need to put them on another computer, or I email it to myself and download it somewhere else.

I technically have one, but it doesn't work and is not plugged in. I don't miss it.

I have one and I still use it for word files sometimes. Now I also have a ZIP drive, and THAT's something I wish I never bothered with, or rather, wish had actually caught on -- no use for it when nobody else uses it... v_v

There have been times where I could have done with a boot disk, but with USB keys nowadays, they're useless for storage.

Yes, I have an USB floppy drive in case I need to use one. Of course, already 2 years before I got this comp (which doesn't have a floppy drive) I moved all the somewhat important data from diskettes to CD's so whatever.

My school used to use ZIP drives exclusively and then we upgraded to external hd's. ZIP drives were the bane of my freshman year. They like to wipe themselves for some damned reason. Spend 10 hours working on something, and since our awesome MACS are set to read only, you can't save on the machine, so the ZIP drive erases itself, and your files are gone.

I bought one with my new computer, because I wanted to install Windows on a SATA HD. But it turned out that the controller worked out of the box.

I had to use my floppy drive exactly once in the 2.5 years I've had this computer.

See, it was a dark and stormy night... no wait, it was an average day. Cold, yes, but after all it was during the winter. It was a Friday. A Friday on which I had to do a physics lab. "Well, I'm sick of doing boring stuff, what can I do this time?" I wondered as I perused the list of possible experiments. One of them quickly caught my eye. "Ooooh, radioactivity!" I cried with glee. Finally, after all these years, I would be able to play with substances that emit alpha and beta radiation (gamma would have to wait). Specifically, the experiment was to determine the amount of radioactive dust in the air. So you pull a whole bunch of air through a filter, then stick it in front of a Geiger-Muller tube connected to a computer and let it counts the ticks. Not wanting to wait the few hours it was going to take to fill up the filter, I stole someone else's and ran to the computer.

Now this is where it gets interesting. The computer in question was a clunky old piece of work. A 486 by my estimate; just going from the "Turbo" button and the LED panel displaying "33" that adorned the front of the yellowing case. Oh well, it would work for my purposes. With everything set up, I started the counting and analysis program and looked at the instructions one more time. "For best results, collect data for at least 10 hours" it said. "Screw that" I thought, and hastily scribbled a sign saying "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, IF YOU BRING ANYTHING RADIOACTIVE NEAR THIS COMPUTER I WILL KILL YOU IN YOUR SLEEP", before rushing out of the lab and back to my room to play another level of Far Cry.

Monday morning. I wake up at 9:00, groggy from the all-weekend video game binge (how do you get past that last level in the volcano caldera, anyways?). I threw on some clothes that I found laying on the floor and headed over to the lab to get my data before my first class. I located the computer and the thankfully undisturbed experiment. I stopped the data collection and looked at the initial graph (which took nearly 5 minutes to calculate). A perfect exponential decay. Awesome; I'll just grab this, make it look fancy, do a quick write-up and I'll be done. But hmm, how to get the data from this computer over to mine? The instructions (which were of a particularly old vintage themselves) suggested just printing it from there. I looked in the corner at the dusty dot-matrix printer that looked like it hadn't been used since the 1980's. No, that wouldn't do. I was about to pull out my thumb drive when I realized that the computer had no USB ports, and certainly wouldn't recognize a flash storage device even if it did. So could I simply e-mail the file to myself? That had been my fallback solution on many occasions, but no, this computer was not connected to the network. Bloody hell, just my luck to get the only standalone workstation on the entire campus.

Glancing at the front of the computer, I then noticed the small slot of the floppy drive. "Aha!" I said. Finally, Naturally I didn't have a floppy disk so I actually had to go to the bookstore and buy a ridiculously overpriced one ($1.00!!) from there. But it worked! After getting back to my room I blew the dust out of my floppy drive and stuck the disk in. It crunched and clicked, but finally opened DATA001.TXT, bringing up notepad with a list of 32,768 numbers. "Oh thank Christ, it even preserved the formatting," I sighed. Excel opened it with no problems, and I was in the end able to do my lab write-up complete with pretty graphs and mathematical analyses.


THE END

But no, other than that I've never used it so I'm voting that I don't use it.

I generally only ever used it to boot when CDROMs weren't bootable. I don't think I've used mine on my current computer ever. At least not intentionally

I generally transfer files over the network, on a cd, or on a small usb drive I have.

Didn't bother to get one with my new computer. I just have one DVD-RW drive.

Yes I do, and yes I use it for I have many old classics downstairs on floppys.

I would, if I had one. My brother often needs to transfer files to this PC, and he has USB 1.0 so it's pretty damn slow for him.

I've got a few hundred floppies in my closet, most of them being firmware for my old old PC, and the rest being games. My PC doesn't have enough 6 pins, so I have to plug it in every time I use it.

I only use it once or twice a year, or when I don't have the internet.

usb storage device > floppy disk

Crap! i meant to use the top one!
I love floppies. Easy way to get small files from here and there.

I voted no as it gets used about once every 2 years.

I needed to use it to fool with my RAID array. That and other random junk, such as when I have to use older computers. For instance, a slide section reconstructing computer still uses only 3.5's. Go figure.

I vehemently advocate against floppies. Wholly unreliable medium for storage. Numerous times, students came up to me @ help desk saying that they cannot read their floppy. I tell them in a more ceremonious way of "you're fracked."

For some reason it wouldn't work when I rebuilt my computer, so it's sitting in the spare Dell box right now.

I have a floppy drive. I last used it years and years ago.

boot disks

I haven't used a floppy disk in years. Wouldn't use one if my computers had them either. I use flash drives if I need to transfer stuff.

[QUOTE=Andrew L]boot disks :P[/QUOTE]
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used it about 3 days ago actually.

I just use CDs for boot discs. What? Your BIOS doesn't have CD drivers in it? Your computer must be old.

.

I have one and it has proved absolutly invaulable several time in the past 3 years.
But I haven't used it in quite some time but I think it's a good thing to have in those "last resort" kind of situations.

It's something that's not really 'useful' anymore but it's not quite useless enough to completely ditch them

I have one on my main PC, mainly just because I happened to have a black floppy and figure since I have it, I might as well leave it installed. I haven't used it in a very long time, but there have been occasions where it's come in handy (mainly to make boot discs for really old computers that can't boot from CD-ROM, or that don't even have CD-ROMs).

I don't actually use floppies for saving files, clearly that role has been filled by flash drives.

no, it does. I just didn't care since I already had an old floppy boot disc handy.

Same

My old school laptop came with one, but I only used it once, to make a windows boot disk for a friend who was fixing our RA's old laptop.

New one doesn't have it, and I can't say I miss it.

I make backups on floppies still, usually on just small files that would be wasteful to pu on a CD.

I made sure I had one when I built my new computer for that specific reason.