The ScooterBlog

Chalk this up as another utility that could be useful at certain times … like with DOSBox.

When would one need the use anymore for a floppy drive? Maybe for an old driver disk that only “extracts to a floppy disk”, or maybe for that old decrepit game otherwise known as abandonware that’s still worth playing! Anyways, most computer don’t come with a floppy drive anymore, nor should they. CD Writers and USB Flash Drives are the new de-facto way to move your stuff around, as wel they should be.

BUT, should you have a program that at least wants to act like a floppy drive is there for compatibility reasons, or if you want to make a image file for one of those old emulators. Go HERE. It’s a link to VMBack, a virtual floppy drive program so you can manipulate floppy disk images as if it was a disk in the drive. It’s Daemon Tools for the 3-1/2″ world.

Something we’ve toyed around with at work is the idea of taking our highest-end Precision Workstations and converting them to 64-bit. The idea being that our renderfarm for our 3D Visualization guys would benefit greatly from being 64-bit (especially since the systems in question all have 4 gigs of RAM, whicih 32-bit doesn’t fully use), but end users may still need some of the compatibility and driver support that 32-bit lends itself to, which I have discovered greatly in the process of even trying to go 64-bit in the office here.

The article HERE goes through how to do this dual-boot. Quite honesty, it doesn’t seem too much difficult than any other dual-boot setup, but it’s good to know this can be done should you have needs to use the horsepower that your Xeon (or Core 2 Duo) processor lends you!