@Desmon:
To be fair, I have actually seen one motherboard which had drivers where you could format a floppy in the background under Windows. If it's implemented right, with interrupts and whatnots, it shouldn't be that damn hard. The problem with Windows (IMHO) is that it has 1: a fairness scheduler (tries to give more CPU to low priority processes that hasn't had cpu for a while) and 2: makes the assumption that hardware banging needs higher priority.
These two tends to make multitasking freak out from time to time. For instance, a high-pri task might have to wait for seconds while a low-pri task is fetched from swap, all because the swap-daemon has a high priority and only takes into account free CPU time, not whether there's actually time to fetch something before the CPU isn't free again (medium high pri task idles out for half a millisecond, but isn't rescheduled until low pri task has been fetched from disk). Result == complete loss of multitasking for seconds at a time. Of course, this won't happen if you install more memory, but then you'll most likely just run more programs, won't you? Also, there's no really sure way of stopping Windows from swapping to disk, afaik...
