You should do what I do. Floppies are unreliable media. burn them to optical media. The first thing that I do when I get a copy of an older game on floppy is to copy the contents to the hard drive and when I have enough I will burn to disc. Not perfect archival media, but far better than floppies.

What I've found is that the floppies themselves simply quit working VERY often.

One of the wonders of living in the paradise of Hawaii, especially this island, on the east side where we have our cabin is can rain 3 times as much up to 150 inches a year. I hear this about other things, such as my sewing machine, just use it, I didn't, my mistake. Rosaboobie who lives in Africa has the same problems with her computers/laptops because of the high humidity.

I use WinImage to make floppy images of my floppies, put these in my Old Games folder, extract the contents of the floppy images into each specific game directory (game folder), and burn the whole Old Games folder onto a DVD+RW, mount Old Games folder as the C drive of DOSbox, and install the games this way.

But still, I'd like to keep a floppy drive around just in case I happen to order a game that comes on floppies - but I think my family might try to talk me out of having EcollegePC add a floppy drive to the computer, so how do I convince them of the merits of having a floppy drive added to this new PC?

Why not just purchase a USB floppy drive and port it to any PC in the house?

USB Floppy Drives

That's a very good idea. We have one that we use on both laptops and our desktop. It's so rare to have to use it- but very now and then it does come in handy and I like the fact I can use it on all my machines.

They'd stop you from buying the PC over a $10 floppy drive? Come on....

I'd rather have EcollegePC add the floppy drive to the PC because at our house, Mom has a PC but I don't play games on hers, and although I'm going to have a total of 3 computers, my laptop is a Macbook Pro which I don't play games on, but just *will* do graphic design (photoshop, bryce) on, and I'll have 2 computers - this new PC from EcollegePC, and an Inspiron netbook with an Atom processor and a 16 GB hard drive with which to play all my games on. What's the merits of having an external floppy drive (I feel like I'm bouncing back and forth between adding floppy drive to the PC vs buying external floppy drive here) if I can have EcollegePC add a floppy drive to the new PC, use WinImage to create floppy images to put into a DOSbox game folder and mount this DOSbox game folder as the a: drive in DOSbox and install a game in this manner into my netbook's DOSbox?

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Just realized something: I can get a floppy drive cheaper (for $10) if I have EcollegePC add one to this new PC I'm ordering next month, whereas if I don't go this route and I buy an external floppy drive it'll cost me more ($40 -$80 - extra money better spent on games instead of wasting it thus).

So my decision is this - I'm forgoing buying an external floppy drive and am going to have EcollegePC add one to my new PC come January.

The only real benefit is that it can be ported to every PC in the house (including the Mac's). I suspect the additional $10.00 isn’t going to break the bank (so to speak). Even if you purchased and installed an add-on unit, you’d still spend more than that when you included shipping.

Right - it's not. I'll still have plenty of money left over after spending this extra $10.


Are you talking about a floppy drive that is mounted inside the PC tower?

Yes, an internal drive - it'll run you about $15.00 including shipping.

Or $10 if ecollege installs it for her.

**Update**

Yesterday: Told Mom that I'd rather our PC-savvy neighbor, David (David's taking a computer course at local community college) order this PC, showed David the final specs in my latest post in this thread here at GB, David agreed, but Mom told me I'd have to wait until "several more months", furthermore, David told Mom & I that he's going to check everything out in Jan/Feb. and he's going to find me the best PC and it'll have Windows XP in it.

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12/26/09 update -

Asked Mom about if David is currently looking for a new PC for me and Mom told me that the new PC's come out in Feb. Any Idea of which week/date in Feb?

There are no new PCs coming out in February. All the really good deals on PCs are going on right now in the before and after Christmas sales. Remember if you get a new PC (not one built by ecollege), you will not be able to get XP. Dell may still sell a few of them, but I'm not sure.

I suspect what Cruise02's Mom really means is that she hopes to have the money for Cruise02's new PC in February.