This thread's fucking hilarious. :D I would say more, but in any realm of sanity no more would need to be said.

Yeah, me too...

Frankly, I'm still pissed that the upcoming Mac port of Bioshock Infinite isn't going to support my 400 MHz Power Mac G4 running OS 9.2.1. I'm going to launch a class-action lawsuit!

My previous PC was a dual-boot XP 32-bit and XP x64. I used the XP x64 for games, the 32-bit couldn't make full use of the 4 GB memory (max is 3 GB for 32-bit). Games were faster in my 64-bit XP.

I didn't like Vista (had it on my first laptop), but I do like Windows 7 and will stick with it until Microsoft turns away from the live-tile sillyness or I will turn away from Microsoft if the W7 lifecycle runs out. But I expect Windows 9 to be better. Every other Windows version was a miss (98 fine, ME a miss, 2000, well, the count doesn't completely go well, 2000=almost XP, XP fine, Vista a miss, 7 fine, 8 again a disaster).

But it's not only out of nostalgia it's sad to see XP go, for people without a need to upgrade their specs, they need to install Windows 7 or 8 on their old machines just to have a secure system after april 2014. My mother's got my old machine, but I will need to upgrade it or she'll run increasing security risk.

Well I hate to say that where I work there is some specialist equipment linked to a HPLC that still uses win 3.1.
Last year they had to purchase a special motherboard from Altech for over $1000.00 when the old one died.
And yes they still back it up to 1.44 floppies, but since these are getting hard to get now they are looking at other backup options. Apparently the cost to validate a new system is more than the cost of keeping the old one going.

Cheers MarkL

I've used Vista for a few years, and it's not that different from 7. It was pretty bad early on, partly due to drivers, and it still is more of a resource hog (RAM, mainly) than any other Windows version, but it was completely usable once I got used to it after XP and after the first service pack. 7 is a marginal improvement. Though that was the x64 version. The x86 version never felt as stable.

One option would be a switch to a USB floppy drive emulator. It uses a standard USB flash drive as the media and is completely hardware-based (no software/driver); as far as the system knows it is a real floppy disk in a real floppy drive.

The partition would still be formatted as FAT or whatever (no fancy modern error checking) so file system errors could still potentially be introduced as the machine writes to it but it would have a flash drive's usual high resistance to errors caused by ageing and physical damage.

This thread started out funny. Now it's just factual, and oft-repeated facts at that.

Interesting, I have never heard of a USB floppy emulator. I will look into this and check out the link you posted.
Thanks for the tip.

Regards MarkL

I thought it was common knowledge that Win 7 was a marketing move by MS to get rid of the "Vista stink" (Post SP2 Vista is supposedly pretty much Win 7 in everything but the name). It certainly worked for me. Having avoided Vista like the plague and was very happy with Win 7. They could have promised me the blue from the sky, but I wouldn't have moved to Vista if MS would have released games exclusively there. But after trying Win 7 for a few days I was sold and always hated going back to a XP machine since.

I don't know if it's common knowledge, but many people are still crossing themselves when they pass by a Vista machine. :)

Vista SP2 is still more RAM hungry than 7, and it lacks the new taskbar and has some other minor drawbacks. Still, it's IMO a decent OS.

Being somebody who was forced to used Vista shortly after it was released, I don't blame them ;-).

Heck, I know from articles and posts that Vista is a decent OS nowadays and I still find it hard to accept it.

Yes, Vista was pretty bad. Not as bad as the Linux distros I tried a couple of years ago, but still bad. The worst was the Vista beta though. Most of them didn't even want to install on my PC (kind of like said Linux distros, but in a worse way).

Why can't I play Mass Effect 3 on this. Thanks a lot, Bioware!
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HarwellDekatronComputer.jpg]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HarwellDekatronComputer.jpg[/url]

Floppies are still being made though, simply due to the fact that a lot of old lab & industrial equipment still use them, so there is a market for them. When the lab equipment often costs at least 15 000€, it is not surprising that they are reluctant to replace it. But when they have to buy a motherboard for that amount of money, it does seem like it would be more economic in the long run to just get a new machine.