Well, as long as it supports 5.25" drives, you can always use a USB 3.5" drive in Windows if it doesn't support dual floppies in the BIOS.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-11-19, 04:13:

Well, as long as it supports 5.25" drives, you can always use a USB 3.5" drive in Windows if it doesn't support dual floppies in the BIOS.

I don't like usb floppy drives. I once bought one from ebay and it does not work and it was not worth returning because it was cheap and the seller was demanding a proof that it does not work and I thought that would be more trouble than it is worth. Is the need for dual floppy drives the reason why I would not be able to build a windows XP system like that?

Baoran wrote on 2020-11-19, 04:42:

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-11-19, 04:13:

Well, as long as it supports 5.25" drives, you can always use a USB 3.5" drive in Windows if it doesn't support dual floppies in the BIOS.

I don't like usb floppy drives. I once bought one from ebay and it does not work and it was not worth returning because it was cheap and the seller was demanding a proof that it does not work and I thought that would be more trouble than it is worth. Is the need for dual floppy drives the reason why I would not be able to build a windows XP system like that?

No, there are board that support dual floppy drives that would definitely work with XP. I just don't know where the cutoff was. If I remember correctly, some boards have chipsets that support dual floppies but the BIOS only supports a single floppy.

That being said, I have a bunch of different USB floppy drives. My favorite was a 2x speed drive that I used for a few years before it recently flaked out on me. Going to see if I can get it going again. If not, I'll order another one.

The others I have are all Dell branded. One is a USB only drive and then the others I have are ones I salvaged from when we got rid of old Dell laptops at work. The old floppy modules also support being used over USB which is really cool.

USB floppy drives are finicky in Windows 10 as in you have to take certain steps to get them to read and to format them but they do still work.

XP should have no problems at all with a USB floppy drive.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-11-19, 06:28:

No, there are board that support dual floppy drives that would definitely work with XP. I just don't know where the cutoff was. […]
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Baoran wrote on 2020-11-19, 04:42:

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-11-19, 04:13:

Well, as long as it supports 5.25" drives, you can always use a USB 3.5" drive in Windows if it doesn't support dual floppies in the BIOS.

I don't like usb floppy drives. I once bought one from ebay and it does not work and it was not worth returning because it was cheap and the seller was demanding a proof that it does not work and I thought that would be more trouble than it is worth. Is the need for dual floppy drives the reason why I would not be able to build a windows XP system like that?

No, there are board that support dual floppy drives that would definitely work with XP. I just don't know where the cutoff was. If I remember correctly, some boards have chipsets that support dual floppies but the BIOS only supports a single floppy.

That being said, I have a bunch of different USB floppy drives. My favorite was a 2x speed drive that I used for a few years before it recently flaked out on me. Going to see if I can get it going again. If not, I'll order another one.

The others I have are all Dell branded. One is a USB only drive and then the others I have are ones I salvaged from when we got rid of old Dell laptops at work. The old floppy modules also support being used over USB which is really cool.

USB floppy drives are finicky in Windows 10 as in you have to take certain steps to get them to read and to format them but they do still work.

XP should have no problems at all with a USB floppy drive.

I tested the usb floppy drive in win10, win7 and even in windows xp laptop and I could not get it to work. I managed to get the directory listing while getting errors but not read any files or format any disks.

If I start searching for a motherboard that would support dual floppy drives how old motherboards I should be looking into? socket370? socket939? slot 1?

I went through my old motherboards and found one that allows having 2 floppy drives and it has 2 cpus also. Does anyone has any experience of how well windows xp does with 2 slower cpus compared to having 2 faster cpu? Of course with old motherboard amount of ram you can put on the motherboard can also be limiting factor when it comes to how smoothly windows xp will run.

AFAIK the socket 478 P4 boards were the last to fully support 2 floppy drives (as far as retail boards).
There are socket 775 boards that support one floppy that can be either 1.2Mb or 1.44MB.
The Asrock Penrynn allows one floppy drive but can be a 360k, 720k, 1.2Mb or 1.44Mb.

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-11-19, 06:28:

That being said, I have a bunch of different USB floppy drives. My favorite was a 2x speed drive that I used for a few years before it recently flaked out on me. Going to see if I can get it going again. If not, I'll order another one.

Yes ! the Sony 2X USB floppy drive is a great external, some of the Dell USB floppy drives work very well from 98SE thru Win7.

The 2x floppy I have was sold under the SmartDisk brand. Looks like Sabrent (only 1.44MB ?) sold one as well. Could very well be Sony internals though.

Then again, the SmartDisk one only lists 1.44MB and it works with 720KB floppies just fine.

The last board that I had that supported dual floppy drives was a Socket 478 P4 board, as Horun stated, but that board as the dreaded CAPACITOR PLAGUE, and is currently languishing in my workshop with my original XBox, waiting for the day I bother to re-cap each. Worry not, I've already removed the Xbox's clock capacitor, to prevent that specific tragedy. Anyway, many boards from that era are likely to need re-capping, which as anyone can tell you, is totally not a dull and tedious process that is one of the top justifiers for procrastination. </s>

I have a P4 in the basement that supposedly supports 5.25 inch drives, but when I put one in (A or B), General Failure. I know the drive works, in fact, it ended up going into a Celeron system. Weird. I'll get more details when I recap the board (it's an MSI IIRC) - caps are on their way.

The old motherboard I have is GA-6BXD and it has 2 450MHz cpus, but I think it is from 2 years before windows XP so I am not sure if it would very smooth experience to use with windows XP especially when I only have 128MB sticks of ram for it. I have not tested it yet, but based on manual I found online you can set 2 floppy drives in bios settings.

Baoran wrote on 2020-11-20, 05:08:

The old motherboard I have is GA-6BXD and it has 2 450MHz cpus, but I think it is from 2 years before windows XP so I am not sure if it would very smooth experience to use with windows XP especially when I only have 128MB sticks of ram for it. I have not tested it yet, but based on manual I found online you can set 2 floppy drives in bios settings.

It would kinda really suck for XP. Not as bad as a single 450Mhz CPU, but definitely not fun.

XP also needs a minimum of 1GB RAM to be useful IMO.

Huch it depends hardly on the programs you run.
If you optimize it will run on less then 256Mb and it will run snappy

This is XP SP3 Professional

matze79 wrote on 2020-11-20, 06:22:

Huch it depends hardly on the programs you run. If you optimize it will run on less then 256Mb and it will run snappy […]
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Huch it depends hardly on the programs you run.
If you optimize it will run on less then 256Mb and it will run snappy

This is XP SP3 Professional

pimp_my_xp.jpg

So what exactly can you run smoothly on XP with only 256MB RAM?

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-11-20, 06:57:

matze79 wrote on 2020-11-20, 06:22:

Huch it depends hardly on the programs you run. If you optimize it will run on less then 256Mb and it will run snappy […]
Show full quote

Huch it depends hardly on the programs you run.
If you optimize it will run on less then 256Mb and it will run snappy

This is XP SP3 Professional

pimp_my_xp.jpg

So what exactly can you run smoothly on XP with only 256MB RAM?

I can get it up to 512MB with 4 128MB sticks, but unfortunately I don't own 256MB sticks to get to 1GB

I run XP on a dual pentium pro 233 system with 512MB RAM. Runs fine. 256MB is not adequate though

Isn't dual pentium pro a bit old for normal XP stuff though? 512MB in XP for period correct software was always a horrid experience for office type computers and for gaming. Tons of swapping going on. Upgrade to 1GB and all that went away for the most part. Later XP games and running a lot of applications at the same time was even better with more RAM.

Sure, there are special use cases, but for normal XP era hardware and software 512MB plain sucked.

I don't concern myself with period correct, though I agree that 1GB is better. XP will run anything that 2k (and for the most part 9x) will while offering superior UX and reliability

I don't really concern myself with period correct either. My goal for pretty much all my builds is to have systems that run games and other software at the highest possible performance so my focus is usually on "overkill" builds except for games or hardware that are speed sensitive.

Personnally I think period correct is silly. A lot of systems were designed to have add on upgrades via expnsion slots and external ports. If something new comes along like XTIDE cards why not impliment them if you feel you need to to enhance your system a bit more.

Like I have with my slime line 1990 Zenith Bull Z286LP Plus by adding a parrallal port and LS120 drive. An inkjet printer can be added to that combination as well. Also added a nic and sound card wit speakers. In future I intentd to get it on our WLAN.