Windows 7: Floppy drive extremely slow

Can anyone help?

Yeah I know everyone will say: "What the bleep do you want a floppy driver for?"

Call me old fashioned, maybe nostalgic, but I still find the odd use for the humble floppy... all 1.5MB of it.

Anyways, for some unknown reason it runs very, very slow on 64bit Windows 7. Takes about a minute to open an office XL file, and longer to close it... a lot longer. Even after the file is closed, the floppy light is still on an clicking, like it's reading the disc still.

The drive itself is OK. I've got XP Pro on the same PC and the floppy is like lightning on XP. Also tried updating drivers, but it says it's got the best drivers available, and that it's working OK. So what the heck is it?

Open to all offers LOL! Cheers PB

It makes me wonder if the hardware vendors are writing good drivers for 7

Honestly, I know you said you want to use your floppy, but try a cheap USB flash drive. People are flashing bios on their motherboards, graphics cards, and storing and running files from them.

I hope someone helps you with this, but I would consider the alternative.

Mate I have to agree with nate42nd... You can pick up a 1Gb USB drive now for between £2 and £5 ($4 - $9 in your money) The frustration, time and effort you are going to put in to try to get your floppy drive to work is in my opinion just not worth it, also floppy's are very unreliable.
I would suggest getting yourself a USB drive, use your XP box to back up all your floppies, then wack them onto a USB pen... job done.
If push comes to shove you could even stick them on a Re-Writeable CD/DVD (takes a bit longer than USB, but is still better/quicker than a floppy - and most proberly cheaper and more reliable)

??? What's a floppy ???

Steve

Thanks guys for all the input. Yeah, already got all the other gizmos, ie, R, RW DVD burner discs, USB sticks etc. But sometimes when I want to avoid having to wade through menus on USB sticks with 500 items on em; or wait for optical drives to boot the DVD InCD or Data disc, then go thro umpteen sub-menus etc, I just save an individual file to an individual floppy - just in case my house gets robbed and they take all my DVDs & USB sticks... after all, who the hell is going to steal a floppy! LOL! I'm probably a bit paranoic, but it's a kind of last ditch back-up to the back up of my other back-ups.

Update: For reasons known only to computers, it's started working normally again. Go figure, hey? Maybe Windows updates did it?

Cheers PB

I have the same problem. I must read and write 3.5" floppy. Good old FDD are useless on Windows 7. The drive still works fine on DOS. On Windows 7 the drive can read the files (slow) but can't write (very, very slow or not at all) and can't format. The USB FDD is the only solution?

I bet it has something to do with antivirus software doing its realtime scanning. After all, nobody expects it to be used on a device that can transfer a blazing 15 or 20KB per second. And nevermind the average access time... *coughs*

It's a new system. The antivirus software wasn't installed yet.
f.