Who needs an onboard CD drive on a laptop?
Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Windows 2000 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by DNA
(552 messages posted)
Why in God's name would you want to install anything on a laptop without a CD
drive?
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If the laptop is otherwise functional, why not? (A lot of the new 'ultra-light'
laptops have no onboard optical drive!)
When you're in a public place web-surfing on their Wi-Fi, the odds are that you're
not using your optical drive (which would shorten your battery life, anyway!)
....
If you're in a hotel room, then it's no problem to use an external optical drive.
I do. My IBM's onboard 8× DVD burner isn't as fast as my external DVD burner (I was
using 8×-speed DVD+RW discs to back up my vacation pictures, and my IBM's burner
only handles up to 4× for DVD+RW discs). Also, I'd rather put the 'wear and tear'
on the standard 5¼" size DVD burner in my enclosure, because regular 5¼" desktop
DVD burners are cheaper, faster (and much easier to find!) than 'proprietary' (ie:
IBM-form) laptop DVD burners!
My
post below details how I installed 98 and XP to my laptop, without using its
optical drive. I downloaded ALL of the drivers, for both O.S.'es, from IBM's websites.
Honestly, the only program that I installed from a CD was the Maximus Decim
Generic USB driver for 98SE, only because I forgot to copy that .exe installer to
the new 120 GB drive while it was connected to my desktop (I did copy all of the
IBM drivers to that drive's "D:" partition, and I keep them on there in case any
get corrupted or missing)
SO, unless you just "have to" be able to play CD's/DVD's while you're in the
coffee shop, or install programs from a CD while you're eating dinner, I'd
say an external optical drive would adequately cover the 'need' for a CD drive (especially
on newer laptops than can boot from a USB device!).
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Athlon 3000+ 939 - 1GB RAM = 98SE (@768 MB RAM) & XP Pro SP2
Athlon 4000+X2 AM2 - 3GB RAM = 2000 SP4 & XP Pro SP2
IBM ThinkPad PIII 933 - 512 MB RAM = 98SE & XP Pro SP2
Windows 2000 Server in the basement
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