I'm trying to resurect my spare laptop to use over the road and it's got a dead floppy drive. Does anyone have a spare laying around that would fit an Acer model 514TXV? The mfgr. doesn't have replacement parts for that model anymore. When I opened her up it had a Compaq sticker on it so I think one of them might work. o No:
i'd be weary of cracking open a laptop without some expertise in working on them. if you have a free usb port an external drive can be had for under $40. you can probably find one to connect to your serial port, too.
They still use floppy drives?? :gt: :spank: I know, I'm ruthless..... The USB idea tho is a good one.. Tho if your gonna USB, why not a CDRW? What you might try doing is eBay searching, or even a google search for the part number of the drive. Popping open a laptop isn't nearly as frightening as one may think, even laptops of yesteryear. The fun part is reassembly! :laugh: I digress, just make sure none of your tools are magnatized and your at least halfway grounded and you'll be okay. Just make sure to stay away from the power section of the thing... One wrong move and astalavista charging system. Sorry I don't have anything to offer, but I think you'll find one. :TU:
Relax! Don't worry guys. I've already been in and out of the thing several times already. Yea CDR and USB are options, however I was hoping for the cheapest way out. I'd like to avoid anything external and remote since I only have one USB that I use for the GPS. I thought that way might be to find a good used replacement for what is already there and avoid more BS. (what an alphabet soup)
Alphabet soup eh? Nah! Only one USB port, and that's a problem? The USB buss itself can handle at least 16 devices as I recall. Hubs are pretty cheap and can give you two or four ports from one plug. Just another option.. For factory replacement, I'd still just search the web and try eBay.. Someones gotta have at least one in working condition.
That other laptop is the one that I use in the semi that I drive. I have several mapping and routing programs that run with a GPS. One thing it let's me do is navigate me around traffic tie-ups while staying on truck routes. At night, I can put it on the passenger seat with the screen facing the windshield in front of it so as to make a heads-up display. Other things it can do is record trip costs, feul mileage, road taxes by state, etc. but only if it can record it to a FDD while I'm running (driving). The CD drive is used to retreive the maps from the data CD's rather than loading all that info onto my HDD, (there's quite a lot of map data) so the CDR idea probably wouldn't work unless I wanted to get a bigger hard drive installed. since space and budget are somewhat limited I would prefer to just get my internal one working again, not to mention that I've already got more umbilical cords attached to it than I'd like.
I found one! Thanx you guys! Once I pulled the defective unit out and did a part# search it was a simple matter of searching for the best deal. I found one brand new for $26.00 delivered.:TU:
