Is this 2004 or 1984?
I mentioned yesterday that there is a free evaluation copy of Microsoft Windows XP for AMD 64 processors.
So I downloaded it, burned it to a CD, and rebooted. The first attempt failed because it didn't recognize my S-ATA drive. I powered down, opened up the case, dug out my old 3.5" floppy drive and plugged it in. Rebooted and pressed F6 to load a third-party driver. No luck, so I rebooted again, dropped into the BIOS and enabled the A: drive. Again, no luck, it seems that my floppy drive had died. At this point I was pretty frustrated. I mean I accept that owning a do-it-yourself computer means a little bit more work, but it seems fairly pathetic that the only way to install a third-party driver on a bleeding edge 2004 operating system is to use hardware that was cool back in 1984.
It's great that Microsoft still supports floppy disks drives, but it would be really fantastic if I could load third-party drivers during setup from my external FireWire drive, or from CD, or from my USB keychain hard drive. It's too late for this to be fixed with Windows XP, but with Longhorn there's still a chance.