OT: Writing floppies on PC; Was Re: Guys take a look

From: Bryan Pope <bpope_at_wordstock.com>
Date: Fri Apr 19 10:34:28 2002

And thusly Doc spake:
>
> On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, John Allain wrote:
>
> > I encoded some family geneology into set of frame HTML
> > pages once. It turned out to be something line 600 small html
> > files, 300 KBytes or so. When I went to put it on a floppy, it
> > took over 30 Minutes to write!
>
> OK. This is completely off topic, but it has bugged me for years.
> You guys are more likely to know, and care, than any other forum I hang
> in. I use a Linux PC as my daily workstation, file server, DNS, MOP
> server, etc. Given hardware limitations, it's stable enough.
>
> I can start a lowlevel format on a floppy, go and surf the net, read
> my email, compile software, or play a game while (45-75 secs) that
> happens.
> Do that in Win<anyversion> on the same hardware, and I might as well
> go make coffee. Same comparison applies to printing large documents.
> WHAT is M$ doing that operating a floppy disk drive takes ALL of a
> 1.4GHz CPU and 512M of memory? I wanna know!
>

It's a Windows things... For some reason they just can't multitask
properly while doing a floppy disk format. Maybe they are still using DOS
type format routines.

With OS/2, you can also do a full format of a floppy and do anything else with
no slowdown.

Cheers,

Bryan
Received on Fri Apr 19 2002 - 10:34:28 BST