and i very rarely need to do it, maybe a few times a year

Yeah. I'm sure those are hard to find.

so just using an old pc for it is not a problem for me

But why not get a usb to ide adapter? Will it not work if you did that?

Floppies dont use IDE for one, and the USB to 34pin floppy only work for 3.5 drives

at least all the cheap ones

Hmmm.... could have sworn. But then again I haven't tried.

Or looked into it.

it looks almost the same, just a few less pins for floppy

I'm in that awkward age group that I used floppies but only the 3.5 floppies so what about the protocol on the connector prevents it from using the other types of drives?

Just because the cheap adapters only coded for 3.5 format drives

Each disk type has its own format, AFAIK

a real floppy controller will use any drive the bios has code for, in dells case all the ones i need

i still can't beleive they never made a PCI floppy controller

I remember my dad using dos and win 3.11 and then 95 and 98. We skipped me and almost skipped 2k. Then xp.

all of them are either on the board or ISA cards

Yeah my family also went from DOS to 95 to XP.

My Compaq laptop came with 2000, and at some point i put lubuntu on there

I remember playing a train. Good game.

Also I really loved rrt2 and rrt3. Back in the dark ages of PC gaming where the graphics sucked but the game really made you work your brain.

i played (and still do sometimes) age of empires so much on that Compaq laptop

i underclock it from 2.4ghz to 300mhz to extend the battery life, and it still runs great

Good game. It's been a long time since I played any of those. Well except for railroad tycoon 2. Lol.

That's certainly an underclock

yep, its downwards multiplier unlocked, i use Notebook hardware control or something like that to do it

looks interesting

What os does it currently run?

Oh it was a pretty fun game when I played it eons ago.

? If you mean the cpu its a 2.4ghz Pentium 4 Northwood

and when i travel i underclock it between 1.2ghz (for stuff like Flatout) and 300mhz (for dos and really old windows games)

oh OS'

I meant what operating system.

i dualboot XP and Lubuntu

Autocorrect got me.

XP for everything except internet

it has a 54mbps Wireless G card, 56k dialup (lol only had to use it once) and 100mbps ethernet

I love xp. It was a great OS. In some ways I miss it, less messy then the current os.

it uses less than 40MB of ram at idle

unlike windows 10 casually hogginh 1.5GB

What's really weird is my desktop from 2004 that came with XP had a gigabit nic but my parents who recently upgraded their internet I had to come and install a gigabit nic in it because there late Windows 7 desktop only had a fast ethernet nic (100mb) and they are paying for 200 mb/s internet.