"Jose" wrote in message
. com...
[re. floppies] Huh? All modern PCs have USB now

To use it, you need a USB device. They are not free. Floppies are just
about free.

Actually, it is not hard to find free USB flash drives. That said, a small
one costs no more than a floppy drive (well, an expensive one like Jay's
proposing to buy, anyway).

And floppies aren't free...they cost on the order of 50 cents each or more.
That's five to ten times as much as a blank CD costs.

As far as drivers go, Windows has the USB storage device drivers built
in.

No it doesn't. Windows 98 is missing lots of drivers, as is 95.

A computer that has a USB controller but does not have USB drivers installed
makes no sense whatsoever. In any case, the fact remains that the drivers
are not specific to the flash drives. The USB flash drives all act as a
standard disk controller, and the standard Windows USB drivers recognize it
as such.

And yes, I encounter these systems all the time in my travels - my wife
uses a 3.11 machine which is fine for what she does (text).

If you have a specific computer that requires the use of a floppy drive to
move data to it, that is one thing. However, it is stupid to generalize
that to a claim that a floppy drive is always (or even often) a useful thing
to have on a brand-new computer.

We are talking about Jay's computer here, not your wife's, or even a
computer that has to operate with your wife's.

Blank CDs cost less than a floppy

... and generally can't be erased and reused like a floppy.

At the price differential, you'd have to be moving a lot of data on a
regular basis before the floppy comes out ahead. For infrequent use, the
read-only nature of CDs is irrelevant (especially given their vastly lower
cost), and for frequent use, floppies are just dumb. If you're moving data
that often, connect the computers with an actual network.

Floppies are still a terrific solution for simple text files (like
Emails).

They are no better a solution than CDs, and frankly when most people want to
move an email message from one computer to another, they EMAIL it.

Again, maybe you have some whacked out, 15-years behind the times situation
in which a floppy drive makes sense. It certainly seems reasonable that if
the rest of your technology is 15 years old, you may need to continue to buy
ancient, obsolete technology in order to continue interoperating with that
15 year old stuff.

But that in no way suggests an answer to the more general question of what a
modern PC needs to have.

Pete