I've not had a floppy drive in my PC for the past year and don't miss it at all. I'm not using the Zip drive either so that's due to go soon, leaving just the combined DVD/CD-RW drive. I use that for backup and occasionally transferring large files, and can boot from it in a crisis.

I was strangely nervous about omitting the floppy drive from my new PC, it was like it was some kind of security blanket, yet I knew logically I didn't need it and wouldn't use one.

The first thing we'd have to do is have the anti-virus companies rethink our 3.5" rescue disks.

I don't use floppies anymore, but prefer the security of being able to boot from them in an emergency

I've been using a 20GB Pockey USB hard drive for the past few months. It's great, and I haven't touched a floppy since I got it. Also I don't have to remember to write something on the label to tell me what's on it.

I just used a 3.5" floppy today to burn a BIOS update on my laptop that fixed a CD-ROM issue I was having. I'm guessing they won't go away until hardware manufacturers provide a network solution for firmware updates.