OT - Video Card Question(s)

In article . com,
"Jay Honeck" wrote:

I told him that I didn't feel "right" using Best Buy or Dell for such a
locally-oriented project. I then offered to put signs up in our
theater that say something along the lines of "The Kiwi -- Powered by
NeoComputers", in exchange for him building a "God Gaming System" for
me -- at his cost.

Sounds like a Win-Win situation.
You may be getting a bigger crowd on Tuesday nights from his customers
as word of mouth gets around.
Has the local press picked up on the KIWI yet?

Has the local press picked up on the KIWI yet?

Nah, I've kept this thing just in the aviation/movie crowd, thus far,
while I worked the kinks out.

Once I get this new system in, and the panel display added, I intend to
have an open house for it.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

On 21 Nov 2006 07:09:20 -0800, "Jay Honeck" wrote:

For those who care, here are some of the specs:

...plus the usual floppy drive


Why?



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...plus the usual floppy drive
Why?

Despite their reported obsolescence, they are still exceedingly useful
for tranfer of small files from machine to machine, especially those
without USB connections and drivers for whatever brand of thumb somebody
has.

Jose
--
"There are 3 secrets to the perfect landing. Unfortunately, nobody knows
what they are." - (mike).
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

"Jose" wrote in message
...
...plus the usual floppy drive
Why?

Despite their reported obsolescence, they are still exceedingly useful for
tranfer of small files from machine to machine, especially those without
USB connections and drivers for whatever brand of thumb somebody has.

Huh? All modern PCs have USB now (heck, any older computer still in use is
very likely to have a USB controller added). As far as drivers go, Windows
has the USB storage device drivers built in. You don't need drivers
specific to the make or model of a USB flash drive. USB is a fine solution,
and CD burners are nearly as ubiquitous. Blank CDs cost less than a floppy,
last time I checked (granted, that hasn't been recently), so if you really
want a viable alternative to USB for "sneaker-net", CDs make a lot more
sense than floppies.

Until I have a chance to try it for myself, I won't bother arguing the RAID
issue that Martin claims, except to say that my nearly-relevant experience
suggests he's wrong (and to explain why I say this).

I built a PC this summer that had a RAID controller on it with a RAID BIOS
setup utility built in. For sure, you didn't need Windows to be installed
to configure the array, and as near as I could tell, once you had the array
configured, Windows would detect it as a plain IDE drive, at least initially
while it was installing, so no extra RAID drivers were necessary. Obviously
once Windows was installed, with the RAID drivers installed, Windows will
handle the higher-level RAID features, such as error reporting and the like.
But I didn't see any sign at all that Windows needed any drivers just to
install.

At the time, I didn't bother to try configuring an array, but for sure
Windows installed onto a single hard drive attached to the RAID controller
without any trouble at all, and no need for a floppy drive.

I haven't bought a computer with a floppy drive in five years, and probably
haven't even used a floppy drive in three. A floppy drive is just a dust
collector these days.

Pete

[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.

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. 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).

Blank CDs cost less than a floppy

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

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

Jose
--
"There are 3 secrets to the perfect landing. Unfortunately, nobody knows
what they are." - (mike).
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

"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

On Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:53:34 -0800, Peter Duniho wrote:

I haven't bought a computer with a floppy drive in five years, and probably
haven't even used a floppy drive in three. A floppy drive is just a dust
collector these days.

So how do you update a BIOS?

Pete

#m
--
Enemy Combatant http://itsnotallbad.com/

"Martin Hotze" wrote in message
...
I haven't bought a computer with a floppy drive in five years, and
probably
haven't even used a floppy drive in three. A floppy drive is just a dust
collector these days.

So how do you update a BIOS?

You get a motherboard that doesn't require a floppy to do so. In some
cases, this involves booting from a CD, in other cases, the motherboard has
a BIOS mechanism that works from within Windows (and sometimes even other
operating systems).

What are you doing over there? Is all your computer hardware stuck in the
20th century? All of your comments seem to ignore all of the progress that
hardware manufacturers have made in the last ten years. It's like you've
never seen a PC that could be operated without a floppy drive before. They
exist, and these days are in the majority.

Pete

On Tue, 21 Nov 2006 15:53:34 -0800, "Peter Duniho"
wrote:
I haven't bought a computer with a floppy drive in five years, and probably
haven't even used a floppy drive in three. A floppy drive is just a dust
collector these days.

I still keep an old laptop with a floppy drive in the closet and it is
configured such that I can quickly add it to the network if there is
something on a floppy that I have to copy to one of my machines... I
also have a couple of 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives that I can
temporarily add to a machine if necessary... Instead of one of the
memory stick USB drives, I use a CompactFlash card reader and use the
CF card that I retired from my digital camera after I replaced it with
a 2G card... About the only time I use a floppy these days is if I'm
upgrading the BIOS on an older machine and the procedure requires me
to boot from floppy... It don't need to floppy often, but I'm not
willing to completely give them up yet...