No escape...nowhere to run...nowhere to hide...

[vovat]

Apparently, Circuit City no longer sells computers with floppy drives, and a lot of them don't even have places to install them. Truthfully, I don't use floppy disks much anymore anyway. I think the last time I did was when I needed a boot disk in order to reinstall Windows. Still, it strikes me as a useful thing to have, in case you need to transfer files and don't have Internet access. A salesman tried to convince me that floppy disks had "gone the way of the dodo," but I'm not sure I believe him. I think they still tend to be used in schools, for instance, even if they really aren't at businesses and such. The guy told me that their computers have "thumb drives," or something like that, but I really don't know what those are. It just seems like a floppy drive would be something you'd want just in case, but I guess they leave them out nowadays in order to cut costs.

While at Circuit City, I glanced at a guide for Final Fantasy II. I've gotten close to the end of the game, but the guide confirmed my suspicions that I had reached a point where it's impossible to get back to a town. So, essentially, if I can't make it through with my current resources, I'll have to revert back to my last backup file, which was much earlier in the game. I remember when I played Chrono Cross, and I was pretty much stuck at Fort Draconia when I gave up. I kind of think there should always be the option of leaving and trying again, and there is in a lot of games. Maybe I'll be able to make it through Castle Palamecia, though. It just bugs me, because if I had known there was no escape, I would have made a backup file before going there.

Comments

[colleenanne.livejournal.com]

A thumb drive is a tiny drive the size of your thumb (hence the name) that holds from about 100 mb to 256+ mb. It hooks up to the USB port and the computer recognized it as another drive. go here.

The only drawback to not having a floppy drive would be for stuff you already have on floppy. You can make a boot disk from on a cd.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

So you just transfer the thumb drive itself from one computer to another?

[colleenanne.livejournal.com]

Right. It hooks up to the USB ports that are located on the front of new computers. Think of it as a zip disk without the necessity of a drive.

[bethje.livejournal.com]

Are those the same as keychain drives or whatever they're called? I've never seen one, but I've heard the term. But I've never heard of a thumb drive.

[colleenanne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the same thing.Read more about it here.

[3x1minus1.livejournal.com]

i hate floppys.. they only hold about 1 meg. that's crap. zips are where it's at.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I've never used a zip drive. Will they work with any computer?

I know floppy disks don't hold much information, but they're useful if you need to work with just one or two files (like, say, a résumé or something).

[3x1minus1.livejournal.com]

if it has a zip drive. the mac zip discs work on both mac and windows (once you format them) which is really nice. that's how i transfer all of my mp3's and stuff to my dad's computer for burning. they hold about 100 megs, but i discovered there are some with larger capacities now.

[head-xplody.livejournal.com]

Hey there, Nathan... that's pretty funny, actually. Beth is my best friend's name and Nathan is her brother.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's pretty weird. Not THAT weird, since they're both pretty common names, but still.