Zip drives were awesome! For about a year there.

Hard drives were supposed to be obsoleted by optical drives some years ago. We were supposed to go from hard drives, to floppy drives, to voyeur drives. About the same time, moralists took over the government. Innovation stifled.

2002/3 for me. In my Visual Basic programming class in high school, the Zip drives were always broken so we resorted to floppies since USB flash drives weren't as cheap or common back then.

Hahahaha. I still love you, zip. No optical drive can tear me from you.

LOL Zippy, no insult intended :P

In my area, they still use floppies.........
http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/7/...d11a16ce9-orig

I have a box of 5 1/4" floppies and a ribbon for an Epson 9-pin dot-matrix printer in my office, both sealed. One day I'm going to put on an exhibit of obsolete computer stuff.

Not only do I have a bunch of lightly used 3.25 inchers, I have empty disk storage boxes that lock. I can't even find a picture of them on line.

Like this? Or, the clear ones that could hold around 50?

I have one of those, somewhere. (The larger ones.) I forget where I picked it up.

Floppy Disks (3.5" variety) are awesome. They'll never be out-dated, never be obsolete!

I'm about to try using nLite 1.4.9.1 to build an XP disc slipstreamed with Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

If this goes reasonably smoothly, I sadly will have less reason to visit my friend, the USB floppy drive.

Well the bootable image I built with nLite has successfully loaded iastor without prompting and is now formatting the drive.

I am also trying the the "Unattended" feature which let me preload prompts (like the key, the language/timezone) that usually require you to hover over an install...as well as preload user, domain, network info, etc. ...waiting to see how that part goes...

I popped the CD in and the entire install ran without intervention. The first thing I've had to click is "to inprove the appearance of visual elements" (although I believe I could have specified the resolution etc. as well). Hmmm...the auto updates setting didn't stick (it is asking me how I want it set). I'm having to enter a "temp" username...even though now I see that the user I built is in place.

Maybe these wouldn't happen if I ran at full auto, but also it would error out and not tell me in this case, if I didn't specify a field properly that was needed.

Well, the actual problem of not having a USB Floppy at home with me was solved by building a slipstreamed CD with this utility, so in that regard "mission accomplished."