Twayne said:
It appears that you don't understand the purpose of the ASR floppy and
that you don't understand the Windows XP installation process.
Not only do I understand them I've used them, including testing ASR
floppies on my test bed.
The
ASR floppy requirement falls in the same line as the floppy
requirement when supplying an unattended winnt.sif answer file or
when using the F6 method to load third party drivers.
Duhhh, you think I should be surprised that to write to a floppy that
.... wait for it ... I need to put a floppy in the drive? Or a CD to
load my drivers are install times? That makes no relevancy at all.
When you
understand the purpose of the files on the ASR diskette and when you
understand that flash drives and CD burners hardly existed in 2001
then you will understand that the requirement for a floppy diskette
is not Microsoft ignorance, it was the only practical way to make ASR
work, without the diskette hardly no one would have been able to use
ASR.
Oh, I see! And CD drives didn't exist in 2001 then? Hmm, what the hell
was I burning my data to then; waffles?
Along with serving up almost forced installs of IE7, fixing how many
thousands of bugs, adding a firewall and all the rest of that since
2001, then I guess it would have been impossible for the brilliants at
MS to have "fixed" the ASR creation process so it could write to (gasp!)
a CD? Or a DVD? Or didn't they exist either?
Let's see, IIRC it was around 1983 Phillips or Sony came up with the
CD for audio? And about the mid 90's, things got pretty hot and heavy
over the CD/DVD releases and soon CDs started showing up in user's
computers?
"Hardly Existed" in 2001 was never an excuse for MS to avoid anything,
let alone a reason to perpetually maintain the necessity of a floppy
drive over the intervening years of thousands of updates and additions
they made to their operating systems. . I could excuse a business
decision in 2001 to not design for optical drives. I understand however
that even Vista and the planned version 7 (with talk about 8) hasn't
addressed it either. Why? Because MS has decided the floppy should go
the way of the dinosaur with the advent of sticks, thumbs, etc.. IMO
for all of MS's fame over backward compatability, this is/was a
monumental black eye for them and did nothing but support their
marketing vision and ignore their users.
It's curious they would work so hard do away with floppy drives and
yet continue to provide software that requires floppy drives. And also
that as the floppy did being its demise, they couldn't be bothered to
fix the only-floppy requirement.
If you'e like it put more succinctly, it's because MS doesn't GAS for
their users, haven't for many years and haven't the faintest intention
of doing some very sensible things. A floppy drive was and is for the
forseeable future one of the requirements for any purchase of a machine
that I make, even if it has to come inthe form of a $10 external pkg.
Yes, I still have a slew of floppies, which are refreshed twice a year
and so far none have gone belly up except the one I dropped and the
spring popped out of the door.
MS's abandonment of its customers doesn't stop at the simple problem of
a missing floppy drive either. Their history for the last decade is
rife with developer development and automatic obsoletion where they
worked very hard to remove current developer's abilities to make their
own decisions and forced them to upgrade. They want to be the single
source for all computer related software and probably hardware shortly
in the world and that's part of what is driving the move to Open source
on them. They've hung themselves on their own attitudes.
So, whatever your silly point was, there's my response to it. Your
assumptions are wrong and so are you. Apparently, your post was nothing
but an attempt to minimize the easy ability to continue to use ntbackup,
complete with an ASR disk, and apparently you resent anyone who would
dare to say ntbackup is a useful app, which it definitely IS. It's
dummies like you that want to confuse people with seeming facts and
innuendo that confuses people and amounts to nothing more than
misinformation in the end. I currently use imaging software, but I also
use ntbackup to create System State backups at will. It's just a
keyclick and it's done. In spite of Microsoft.
