Quote Originally Posted by Ze_ro View Post
CD-RW's would seem like a great idea, but I have a bad history with RW's somehow becoming unrecoverable coasters, and I no longer trust them enoug to buy them.
Aye, likewise.
Most of the tools available are geared towards using USB hard drives, and generally don't do anything other than USB mass storage.
In the limited experience I've had with them, they're not so bad. Those USB expansion cards are still $20 a pop, though. The last one I tried had some weird power consumption issues.
At the time, I had no USB flash drives, but was trying to get things working with an SD card reader. It's USB mass storage, right? Shouldn't be much different from a hard drive, right? Well all I managed to accomplish was corrupting the file system on the SD card, and wasting tons of conventional memory on USB drivers.
Apparently there are Compact Flash-to-IDE adapters that will work even on very, very old computers, but I've never tried them myself. Plus I reckon they might not be plug-and-play.
Internet software for DOS can be a little dicey (and lord help you if you try it in Win 3.1)
If you have Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, apparently it's not bad at all. But dealing with DOS drivers is just icky. You might as well try a null modem cable if you go that way - not that I had much success with that either.