Stupidities Remain

By James Gaskin, NetworkWorld.com, 11/05/04

There are two stupidities I'd like to rant about quickly.

First of all, let me take a swipe at Microsoft. After all these years, and all the 'research' they claim under development, why do I still need a floppy drive to install the operating system in many cases?

Early on in the operating system load, a message across the bottom of the screen tells you to hit the F6 key if you have disk drivers from a non-Microsoft vendor to load. Since I had the SATA drives, I hit F6. Guess what? The installation program refuses to look at any driver letter except A: for the disk.

I already had the CD-ROM drive going, because Windows XP was loading from the CD. In fact, the new system booted from the XP CD. Yet I had to stop, go to the PC graveyard (garage), and pull a floppy drive out of an old system. Yo, Bill, Software Architect, couldn't you suspend the OS load long enough to look at the CD drive for a different disk? There's really no other reason for a floppy on a modern PC, except for loading drivers during OS installation. Dumb. This is so 1994.

Second, the new SATA drives are great but the new SATA connector stinks. It's small, meaning motherboard makers can cram a bunch of them into a tiny portion of motherboard real estate, but they don't latch at all and easily fall out.

The connectors are indexed so you can't put them in the wrong way, but they have nothing to keep from falling out of the connector at the least little bump. Twice I dislodged the hard drive SATA connector from the disk assembly while working with other cables in the PC case.

Why didn't someone on the SATA standards committee get smart and notice the handy little tab on the telephone RJ-11 jack? Or the same tab on the RJ-45 Ethernet jack? Or something similar to keep the small connector connected?

Stupidities score: Bill and Microsoft still floppy brained, and the SATA connector should be much better.

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