Floppy Disk Drive Resource Hog Normal?

[Guest]

Hi,

I have a 900 MHZ AMD Thunderbird (VIA KT-133 Chipset) with 640 Megs of RAM running with Windows ME. However, with this type of speed, whenever I either perform a copy of files to a floppy drive (A drive) or delete files from a floppy drive, my whole system is unusable until the floppy drive actions are completed. Then the system goes back to nominal performance when the floppy actions are completed. Is this right? With all the technology I have on my machine, there is so great a bottleneck on resources while performing a floppy drive access, that I can't do a single thing else on my computer (like start a Word document, or any other program simultaneously, etc), until the floppy drive controller is done doing its thing? Basically, I am locked out of doing anything else. Does anyone else have this problem, and is this normal? Please advise. Thanks in advance. Note - I do not have any IRQ conflict with the Floppy Controller (Presently automatically set to IRQ 6)

 

[baron]

I do not know. But people on the boards have commented about the +512meg ram problem with Windows using and sorting it out. Could that be it?

IMacs for the blind

 

[fuSEboX]

As far as memory is concerned, you are wasting anything over 512 megs,since win9x/me won´t see anything above that. To take full advantage of all that ram ou need nt/2k

Floppy acces is usually slow and resource hog, at least on 9x/me. Same thing happens to me (asus p2b) and to everyone else i know running 9x

 

[zPacKRat]

your floppy controller is unable to use dma and will slow your system down while it's being used in any way.
any system will do this!

 

[Spdy_Gonzales]

Floppy drives have always been slow. What are you doing with the floppy drive for it to become an issue. For example, there are better alternatives for backing up data such as a Zip drive, another hard drive or even a CD-RW (although they tend to be slow too)

I wonder...what is the speed of gravity?

 

[mousepotato]

On my POS P166MMX, the floppy is slow, and will take around 30 seconds to write 1MB. But, I don't have any problem running other apps while it's doing it's business. I use Win98, maybe WinMe is the problem. I have heard a lot of people complain about it. Doesn't seem like a huge problem, though. If that is your only complaint with it, WTF. How often do you use floppy anyhow.

<font color=green>I've had enough cookies.</font color=green> <font color=blue><i>Got milk?</i></font color=blue>

 

[Guest]

I'd say get a zip drive anyway. It'll hold a lot more data, especially if you find yourself using floppys to any extent. CD-RW can be slow, as Spdy says, plus if you want to work on the file straight from the disk for any reason forget it. It all depends on your needs, of course.

Al