M2TW beast

[Lemur]

Looks like a truly next-gen rig, man. Two thoughts:

1. Do you really need a floppy drive? If so, why?
2. Is a 250 gig HD going to be enough? Or are you planning on slapping in another one down the road?

[Husar]

Do you really need a floppy drive? If so, why?

Isn't a floppy drive needed to install SATA drivers in order to install Win XP?
I heard you need either a floppy drive or USB device or something like that.
This is one of the reasons I don't have an SATA HDD yet, I simply don't have a floppy drive anymore and don't want to buy an USB stick either so I'm curious now.

[Lemur]

I wasn't aware of any SATA limitation on WinXP installs -- in fact, I've been re-installing all over the place on my SATA-only system. Then again, I'm using WinXP Service Pack 2, so perhaps that makes a difference. But any edition of XP you can buy will be SP2, right?

You might need a floppy for RAID installs, but even then there's very little you can do with a floppy that you can't do with a burned CD. I was told that running MemeTest86 required a floppy: untrue! There's a CD-image version one can download.

I'm hard-pressed to think of any reason a regular consumer would require a floppy drive. Death to the FD!

[Husar]

My XP CD is rather old, it doesn't even have SP1 and for obvious reasons I'm not going to buy a new one, I heard you have to press F6 to install additional drivers and then install SATA drivers from some other device. Since your copy seems to include SP2 I think that explains why you have no problems.

[Lemur]

If you're feeling adventurous, you could always create your own slipstreamed copy of WinXP using the version you already have ... that's how I wound up with mine ...

[Husar]

Thanks for the advice Lemur, I definitely want to try that, just need to find someone whose computer I can use to do it with since I replaced my burner with an ordinary DVD drive.

[Yun Dog]

Ya I thought that about the floppy too - but then I did just fry my laptop MB doing a bios update from the HD - so a floppy can have its uses

re the 250 gig - ya maybe not enough - but i do have a 120 gig dog with all my stuff on it... and getting another one is easy..

thanks for the wisdom

what about that MB - looks like its got onboard graphics and sound - redundant? - shouldnt i go for some sort of creative sound card?