Problem opening 3 1/2 floppys

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I have Win 98 Se and Word 2000. I have some floppys that have word documents on them. 99.9 % of the info on these floppys are text. What I am having a problem with is it takes a very long time for these floppys to open. I put in a new floppy and have the same problem. Is there something else that can cause this slowness. I even changed the memory to higher ram. Could Macros have anything to do with this problem?

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Floppies are notoriously unreliable. It’s doubtful that the content is the problem; you’re having the same problem with multiple disks, which to me indicates the drive itself. Floppy drives suffer from head alignment problems among other things. Try this as a test: put one of these disks into a different computer and see what kind of access time you get. I’ve had floppies that would not read in one computer work just fine in a neighboring system.

As long as you are able to read the disks, I would strongly urge you to copy their contents to a more reliable medium – hard disk, CD, USB drive – before the disks become unusable.

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I put in a new floppy drive and still get the same slow opening.

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Do you have an anti-virus program that scans files when you try to open them? As floppies are so slow, this could be causing the symptoms you describe.

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I thought of that Lyra_J and checked my Anti Virus and found nothing there that would scan the floppy disk. What puzzles me is floppys that I made five years ago open up in a flash. Has something changed so much in the same brand name floppys of today that there is such a difference?

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You realize that you’ve just added a new twist to this thread that was not clear in your original post! Is it clear that you’re saying you have some older disks that open quickly and the ones that are giving you trouble are new (purchase time)? If that is the case, it sounds like you’ve gotten a bad or less than acceptable batch of floppies.

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