It appears that there is an internal integrity check on the mirc.exe itself. Now I can't upx (compress an executable) mirc and fit it in a floppy!

Many, if not most, computers arn't equipped with floppy disc drives anymore so sooner or later you'd have to stop doing it anyway.

Only lamo pre-packaged family computers would omit a floppy drive, however they still support them. There is no sign that motherboards will obsolete FDD anytime in the next 5 years, like they have with serial and/or parallel ports. There is still no standard medium that supports reading and writing at the bios level, with the exception of harddrives.

This isn't to say that I think Khaled should disable his integrety checks just to allow upx compression. I'm very pleased with this change as it strengthens trust and helps ensure that virus scanners don't false-positive mIRC due to some hacked up distro.

- Raccoon

I didn't include one in the last one I built for myself so it's not only factory built machines. Whether the motherboard still has a socket for them is not relevant. You can still buy motherboards with ISA slots and who buys ISA cards now???

* Watchdog listens...

Looks like no-one does. (At best 1%, those being people who still use Win 3.1, etc)

I don't remember the last time I picked up a floppy disc. Where I work all the floppy drives are disabled yet I can open the CD drawer at any time or shift files using the network.

Floppy discs have just about run their race. They are unreliable, far too small for most of todays uses, vulnerable to the sorrounding environment and completely unsuitable for mission-critical data. Actually, the last time I used one was to carry arround the client half of VNC for a while but that is going back a very long time, back before I had a laptop.

Only suggestion I could offer the poster is to use Drivespace to compress the floppy, though this will ultimately only make it more unreliable in my opinion.

lol my digital camera carries mor data than a floppy drive in less than 1/4 of the size

Yes at 1/4th the size, and probably at 10x the cost. You can get a floppy disk for about 1 cent, can you say the same about a flash card/memory stick?

granted ... i was simply comparing the siz of the storage medium and not the price. besides comparing price of them two is like comparing apples and oranges anyways. u cannot get a 1.44 mb card. and u cannot get a 64mb floppy.

Let me see you boot off a 64mb flash card.
Let me see you make modifications to autoexec.bat on a CDRom.

again apples and oranges ..... for a couple reasons ... u cant boot off a medium that the bios cant recognize at startup. if it did ... then yes u could boot off a card. as for the other ive got no clue. but the arguement is pointless, i wasnt saying one was better than the other ... just saying that the technology has had some major changes since the floppy come out. and its still changing everday ... nothing is impossible... just not possible currently

We will never see USB device recognition at the bios level, such as USB card readers, until the operating system (windows) is installed at the bios level... which is not possible.

usb keyboard support isnt at bios level? coulda surprised me... anyhow i wouldnt say never anything is possible .. maybe not probable