I for one prefer to have my laptops with as few moving (and especially spinning) parts as possible. In the days of half-terabyte USB sticks, having a disk reader inside a laptop is dead space/weight used for archiving/ripping, and certainly doesn't need to be as portable as the rest of the computer. This weekend I'm replacing a kaput HD on a Dell laptop with an SDD (if I can figure out to reinstall Windows on it for the laptop's owner, fine, if not it's Kubuntu 20.04). I have an external drive for CD/DVD/Bluray and another one for floppies that is shared between devices. The floppy drive -- a $14 Aliexpress generic -- is flaky but that usually seems more the fault of the media than the drive. How old are those disks? How fragile are those sliding covers? My main laptop uses a dongle for wired Ethernet (a reasonable trade-off considering how rarely I use it),but I've seen ingeniously-thin RJ45 sockets built into some units. - Evan On Thu, 30 Apr 2020 at 10:57, Howard Gibson via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
James,
Does your USB floppy drive work? I keep ordering these things and they work once or twice and then crap out. The one I have now never worked. They cost something like twelve bucks. I am willing to pay more of something that works.
On Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:39:44 -0400 James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On 2020-04-27 10:22 AM, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
I think my current laptop has an RJ45 port. I bought a docking
station for it, so I use that. Historically, I use the RJ45s because I transfer data to and from the laptop, and I want it to happen quickly.
I use Wifi or Ethernet. For normal use, WiFi is fine. But if I'm doing something major, such as installing an OS, then I'll use Ethernet.
I visited Canada Computers in Etobicoke, and I think I got the
last desktop with slots for DVD/Blu-Ray discs (and 5-1/4 floppy drives), and controls on the front. My cat can no longer turn my computer off. You people are on your own!
At least I have an external USB floppy drive! ;-)
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-- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch or @el56