[Stuart]

I personally stopped using floppies for my own purposes years ago (even with drivers, I just tend to slipstream them into a new XP CD). Too unreliable.

At work, we use them as boot disks to log on to the network and run an uattended install of Windows XP. It's quite a neat disk actually. It has drivers for all our various network cards and chipsets, and uses Plug and Play to detect the right one and install it. All we have to do is provide the machine name and select whether it's a staff or student machine.

We also have boot USB sticks, but not all of our PCs boot properly from USB.

However, with Microsoft releasing Windows PE as part of the Vista Distrubution kit, we'll be using that and boot cds from next year. I know we could theoretically have used Boot CDs this year, but our current bootdisks write details of the configuration to the boot media, so CDs are out.

Of course, some students still use floppies, and complain bitterly (and sometimes try and blag coursework extensions) when the floppy containing the one and only copy of that massively important coursework) becomes corrupted.

In fact, a few years back, I even had a student try and save video to a floppy.