Greetings all-- 



I have found through occasionally painfull experience that "saving" anything directly to a floppy when Windows XP (or Vista, I'm willing to bet) is your OS, that saving to a hard disk location is always best. Once you've done so, right-clicking on the file, then using the "Send to 3 1/2 " Floppy A" is a more reliable way to 'protect your data'. The same applies to 'opening' anything from a floppy. You will be better off if you copy it to a location on your hard disk, then 'double-clicking' on it to open it. It seems that using any application (MS Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc., any other app) to save directly to a floppy when the OS is WinXP or higher is asking for file corruption. It appears, from my experience, that it is better to save to a local hard disk location, then allow Windows to COPY the file from that location to the floppy. The same applies in the reverse; if the file is on a floppy, copy it to My Documents, the Desktop, or 'wherever' on the local hard disk, and only then attempt to open it. 



FWIW 

HTH 



Paul A. Shippert 

Library Media Specialist 

Margaret Brent MIddle School 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phillip Williams" <[log in to unmask]> 
To: [log in to unmask] 
Sent: Thursday, December 4, 2008 3:17:17 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern 
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] floppy printing 

  Sue, 

 Did you try to save the same info to the floppy you re-formatted to see if 
it now works? 

 I don't know about your dos program (or much about dos at all!), but I own 
an old Sony Mavica camera that uses floppies to record images and every so 
often I would get one that I could not read (sometimes after succesfully 
opening the files repeatedly before). I just wrote it off as an inherant 
flaw with floppies. I probably should research a little to test my theory 
(which I will do now). But I'm curious why not use another media such as a 
thumb drive. 

not much help but good intentions, 

 Phil 

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Sue <[log in to unmask]> wrote: 

> Hi Lister, 
> 
> Here is a funny question for you. 
> 
> This happened twice on two different setups. 
> 1. brother printer connected via usb on gateway running windows 2000 
> 2. epson laserjet 1500 printer conencted vial parallel port on a IBM aptiva 
> running win 98 1st edition 
> 
> Both machines have the same dos program, 
> a floppy was inserted and a blank page printed. 
> Took another floppy with  data originating fromt he same dos program and it 
> printed well.  Recreated the data on the non printing floppy onto another 
> and it printed.  Formatted the non printing floppy and it showed all was in 
> order. 
> 
> Why? 
> 
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