Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 January 13

= January 13 =

Second Gmail account or Google account
What is Google's policy for having second gmail account and google account? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.29.33.8 (talk) 01:04, 13 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, I have 9, so apparently they allow it. They do get suspicious that you might be a bot after a while, but they have captchas for that. StuRat (talk) 01:53, 13 January 2015 (UTC)


 * They have a multi-login thing that works pretty well. You can be logged into multiple google/gmail accounts and switch between them via a dropdown that appears in the upper right of most google products.
 * They used to have a "real name policy" (like Facebook does), but they gave up on that. So I guess feel free to name your Google accounts whatever you like.   APL (talk) 01:29, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
 * In addition to what StuRat and APL have said, you may see this Gmail forum discussion too. -- Tito ☸ Dutta 11:49, 15 January 2015 (UTC)

If computers are no longer made with floppy disk drives, then...
How would you access your old floppy disks? A lot of my old school assignments were on a floppy disk. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 22:52, 13 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Through external drives that connect through a usb cabel. See a sample product can be viewed here Avono (talk) 23:11, 13 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I carry a USB floppy drive in my kit. Some of my clients are manufacturing plants and some of their equipment is a bit old, but still does the job. One such is a specialized lathe with running Windows NT Workstation 4.0 with $6,000 worth of CAD software that they use floppies to transfer programs. --  Gadget850talk 23:14, 13 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I had the same question a few years ago, when I wanted some old software that I only had on floppy disk. The answer is almost certain to be, you can't.  Even if you do find a floppy drive, the chance of (a) it being in very good working condition (no head alignment problems etc) and (b) the disk being in good enough condition to read it are essentially zero.  In ordinary use, a floppy disk has a lifetime of as little as three years, though this could be extended considerably in archive conditions (a quick google suggests it might reach 30 years under absolutely ideal conditions, ten to twenty years in general).  The back of your closet doesn't count as archive conditions, so I'm afraid you're almost certainly out of luck.  GoldenRing (talk) 23:55, 13 January 2015 (UTC)


 * OP's mileage may vary. I've found disks that were ~10 years old and have been able to recover old photos off of them.  They were just thrown in a box when I moved and forgotten.  Granted, they were with some other disks that were unreadable.  So, there may be some hope for OP.  Dismas |(talk) 01:34, 14 January 2015 (UTC)


 * A year or so back I was able to pull files off of old 800k HFS floppies that'd spent the better part of 20 years in a cardboard box in a basement, using a cheap USB floppy drive controller I picked up at the local Microcenter. Was easy. The bigger issue was finding a program that'd read old ClarisWorks database files. Horselover Frost (talk &middot; edits) 18:22, 14 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I have to assume that the stuff on my 800K Mac floppies is lost forever ... but I still keep them. —Tamfang (talk) 09:23, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
 * You might need to get an old (Mac) computer to read them, perhaps an old computer with an ethernet connection, then you may be able to use ftp to send the files somewhere. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:49, 14 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I used a Kryoflux USB floppy controller and the drive out of an old bricked Performa. Cost about $100. I think it can read any floppy with any drive (not specifically requiring an Apple made one for Apple disks), but not sure on that. Horselover Frost (talk &middot; edits)


 * I have hundreds of old floppies, both 3.5" and 5.25". I copied all the really important data to hard drive many years ago using old computers, and many of the discs are now unreadable, but I recently copied data onto new 3.5" floppies for someone who still uses these.  I certainly had read problems, and had to use several different drives, but eventually managed to make copies.  For old 5.25" floppies, an old computer that has a Western Digital FD1771 disc controller is useful because it had a documented facility to read whole tracks where the individual sectors have become unreadable.  Patching together files from a full track read is very time-consuming, and not really recommended except for really important text files.  As stated above, the conditions in which the discs have been stored is critical.  You might be lucky.    D b f i r s   00:01, 15 January 2015 (UTC)