I never found much use for zip drives. A few years ago I was really hoping
that zip or ls120 drives would replace floppy drives, as I really, really
hate floppy drives -- too slow, too many errors, etc. But the price on the
media remained high, and the market never took off. I see many new PCs on
the store shelves at Best Buy without a floppy drive, but I always include
a floppy when I build a PC. Have you ever tried to install XP onto a SATA
or SCSI drive without a floppy drive present? How about burning a CDR just
to flash the motherboard BIOS?
I spent quite a bit of time/effort trying to come up with a better floppy
drive for my own use, including trying out both the IDE and SCSI versions
of the LS-120 drive. But their operation was always weird and unreliable.
End of off-topic rant, we now return you to your regularly scheduled
programming....
I built a matx pvr a while ago, and thought that a regular internal
cd-rom, dvd-rom would fit, as the case said it would. But it turns out
that the drive would hit the top of my cpu heatsink. Now all that is in
that machine is a floppy, and a 120 gig harddrive. If I want to reinstall
windows I will have to pull out a cd-rom drive, and put it on the
motherboard.
As a side note has anyone tried the boot floppy window xp installs, I seen
the directions and its a nightmare. Whereas the Gnu/Linux floppy install
can be still found at various distro's. I still threaten my wife if the
OS craps out or needs a reinstall, I will put linux on it. She does not
like that idea one bit, even though she uses my linux desktop all the time
for various things, she is afraid that she won't understand how to use it.
What gets me is I have an external dvd burner that for the life of me I
cannot get my motherboard to boot off the device. I have tried every
option in the mb bios and I am still unable to get a boot off a external
drive. Regardless of how much I want to put linux on that machine I
probably will not be able to due to my wife not wanting it.
So I very much might end up with a usb stick such as 512 or 1 gig just to
install and have as a backup device for certain files that need to be
saved.
A few months ago after a lengthy RMA process on a motherboard my zip drive
stopped working, and I thought it was dead. It turns out that the MB had a
voltage problem, and no matter what zip disk I tried it would not read it
but offered me to erase the disk. It was very weird, so when I switched
MB's I went through my zip disks again and everyone was able to be read
like normal, very weird. Nothing was changed other than connecting it to
the new board, no jumper settings or anything else happened. I guess zip
drives do not like low voltages, it was reading like 3.7 on the +5 volt
line, so it was not much of a surprise.
I am surprised that no one mentions the psp, it seems that one of the cool
things about the psp is if you have the right amount of flash you can
watch movies on it and play games. I know you could of done it years ago
with pda's but for some reason it never took off. I only know a few people
that do it, for some reason watching the latest Sony movie on a psp is
ironic to some people.
I just wonder when will the the MPAA allow such things as a Video ipod.
Make the screen a little bigger allow mpeg, divx, xvid codec's to be
played, as well as the current crop of music, you could have the next cool
must have device. Put wifi on it, to allow browsing, or watching streaming
media and maybe have a voip client it could be the device that changes
everything.
It probably will not happen for many years, due to the power of the MPAA,
and with all the copyright issues. Apple could due it kind of like a
Vidtune let people download movies to their vpod, or something, or even
have vpod casting let people tune in to homemade movies streaming over the
internet. Yeah I know you can do this now with a laptop, but most people
will want a small device to do it with.
Gnu_Raiz