I have a question regarding A drive on an XP Dell computer

I am a senior citizen...and have above average knowledge on computers....but technology is moving too fast for me.

I want to copy a word document to my A drive to a disk.

I cannot find A drive?????? Where is it?????

There's a drive for a CD, but I don't think I can burn them (wouldn't have a clue how to and don't own a CD anyway).


Thanks for any help you can give me.

Or, was the floppy (A:) there before and not now?

This may seem like a silly question, but when you say you cannot find write anything else to it.the A drive, do you mean you physically cannot find it or that you can't find it under My Computer?

I ask because a lot of computers now are sold without floppy drives. For data transport, a lot of people use "thumb" drives you connect to your USB port. These are fairly inexpensive, for future reference.

Regarding your CD, most CD drives sold in computers today are capable of burning discs. (Look on the front of it and see if it has the CD-RW symbol or only CD-ROM. It'll say RW somewhere it can burn.) It's not very efficient to burn one Word document to the disc because they can hold up to 700megs of data and, unless you have the re-writable kind, are not reusable the way a floppy is.

(what I would probaby call a 'thumb' drive....Because that port is how a friend of mine loaded my microsoft word.(he works for sprint)...but he's the kind of friend that you only ask something once of (he is my son's friend, actually)

Thank you so much for responding. I have typed a book that my son has written, and I talked to him, so I am just sending the word document to him in an email.

I worked on the computers at Ford Motor Company for over 30 years, but technology is moving much to fast for me. I don't have the desire to be troubled with something I don't have knowledge about. Sounds like I'm lazy...but I just have other things I'd "rather" do.

Have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year. This website is one of the best.!

I understand how you feel, actually. Keeping up with trends is nearly impossible unless you make it a full-time hobby/job. Networking issues are my blind spot, particularly wireless networking. I never had a reason to concern myself with it until the last year or so, and while I do understand enough now to know I don't want wireless for my systems, I find myself unable to answer the common questions people ask me.

And at some point between the time I built my own web site back around '94 and decided to modernize it a couple years ago, HTML and its associated elements *completely* changed. I'd never even heard the term "cascading style sheet" until then, and now it helps significantly to know something about it so you can tweak your web browser to display things the way you want.

Anyway, back to your issue, when I built this system I didn't include a floppy. I wasn't really aware it was a growing trend. I just knew I had a box of 3.5 floppies I'd purchased some time ago and had never opened. When I need to transfer a small file between computers, I usually do what you did and just e-mail it. For large amounts of data, I use CDs and DVDs.

Take care.

Some ISP's have a limit on the size of a file you can send via E-Mail. You may have to send him that book in segments (chapters?). Good luck.



:thumbsup:

again for your responses.