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General discussion

XP Quirks

Nov 19, 2003 10:34PM PST

Hi all,

Ever since I have started using XP both Pro and Home, I have notice very spotty, sluggish floppy drive performance even on different machines. I can copy files onto a floppy on one machine the go to another machine and it will not read the floppy. Also when I drag and drop either from or to the floppy drive it often take way too long to copy the file over. I also get notices telling me a certain disk is not formatted, or that the floppy can't read from the disk, all sorts of stuff.

I have noticed it on different machines with different drives XP Pro and XP Home.

Also recently I installed XP Home on a box I built and at this point everything is going fine with the machine except for one curious thing that I have never seen before.

During the boot process when it gets to the point where the boot "screen" shows, it only shows for like 2 seconds and then the screen goes blank for like 10 seconds. During this time I can tell that the machine is working its just that the screen it blank. Also, during that time, the monitor goes from being "On" with a green light showing to "engergy saving" (I assume) with an orange light showing for a couple of seconds, then the green light comes back on, and after about 10 seonds has passed, the machine continues to reboot. I have never seen this. I would assume the boot screen would normally been seen during this time that the screen is blank but it isn't....its not a huge deal as puter problems go but I suspect its something relatively small .....

Any enlightenment would be greatly appreciated!


Specs:
ASUS A7N8X
Athlon XP2700+
Mushkin PC2700 2-2-2
ASUS 9800XT

Discussion is locked

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That floppy issue is not OS specific.
Nov 19, 2003 10:50PM PST

I've run into this for years. It improved about the year OS/2 appeared. With that OS, you could actually format a diskette and continue to use the machine. What an advance!

"I installed XP Home on a box I built and at this point everything is going fine with the machine except "

Ahh, the joys of finding what is amiss on a new machine. I had one box like that and in exasperation tried another Windows (9Cool and that wouldn't install either. An install of Linux found a SCSI issue so I knew where to pinpoint my troubles.

Seems you are covering old ground here and may want to consider this.

1. No more floppy drives. At the office, these relics are rare now. We just put in CDRW and LAN connections.

2. XP doesn't like anything amiss with the hardware and won't tell you what it is. You on the other hand told NOTHING about the hardware so there isn't much to write about.

While on the surface it may seem I've glossed over your issues, I haven't. My response is to get you to write more about your problems in detail and to reconsider that the floppy drive isn't very reliable. Many will have some old drive (or even a new drive), some media that flunks or won't format it there or here and try again. The floppy is a dead and troubled item, but it still lives on.

Bob

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Re:XP Quirks
Nov 19, 2003 11:04PM PST

My XP Mome machine does exactly the same in both aspects.
Like Bob says, floppies are nearly useless these days, and I've just learned to live with some of XP's little annoyances. It used to be 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'; with XP it is 'if it ain't broke much, don't fix it'.

Ken

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Thanks Bob and Ken!
Nov 20, 2003 3:16AM PST

I do genuinely appreciate your both taking the time to reply to my post.

Bob, I hear you about the floppy drive, but I guess as long as I can pick up a new one for $15 and case makers keep putting brackets inside and slots on the outside for them I will keep putting them in. I guess what made this issue stand out for me so much is that since I started using PCs in 1995 with W95 through W98SE I have never seen behavior like this from a floppy drive. In fact, over the years the floppy drive has probably been the most reliable componet I have worked with.

I didn't put it in the original post but I also see some of the same behavior when I use my SparQ drive. As much as I have scoured the net I have not been able to find XP drivers for it and it wants to act up occasionally.

Another thing that may make no difference is that I have 4 drives partitioned on the one physical hard drive and somehow when I did the installation of XP Pro, I set the first drive (C) to use NTFS but the other three ended up being FAT32. I asked about this in another forum and I got back that it didn't really matter that much unless I was having problems. So I never converted drives 2-4.

I'm not sure what kind of hardware info you are looking for other than what I gave in my initial post. Please advise. The info I did give was for the new machine which had the blank screen problem and would not read a floppy written to on my machine. My machine is an ABIT KR7A-RAID (I don't use the RAID function), 1800+ CPU, 512MB Mushkin DDR2100, TEAC 24x burner, internal IDE Sparq drive..and thats about it, was this what you were talking about?

The blank bootup screen turned out to be a driver issue, I rolled back to an earlier version which shows me the lastest is not always the best.

Thanks again for taking your valuable time guys!

Ken