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DVD Drive

Strat
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DVD Drive

My ancient HP laptop has finally given up the ghost.

I'm browsing around Currys site and of the 280 laptops they have on offer only 8 have a DVD/CD drive built in. I also found this situation when browsing Ebuyer's PC offerings recently when the grandson decided to purchase one.

Am I showing my age here and nobody uses CDs or DVDs any more.

My old laptop was used as a backup access to the internet when my main PC had troubles and during servicing visits to my daughter's house where 3 laptops and a number of tablets operate.

Someone is bound to mention USB sticks here and maybe that's the way to go.

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18 REPLIES 18
steveocee
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Re: DVD Drive

You are in fact behind the times! (Sorry)

Optical media is only really kept alive these days by DVD with a small percentage being Blu-Ray.

You can pick up an external USB DVD drive these days for £10 form Amazon should you still need the functionality but as more things now go to streamed media, downloaded apps and cloud based utilities they are virtually redundant.

The last 4 PC's I built had no optical drive at all.

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Baldrick1
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Re: DVD Drive

DVD/CD Drives seem to be considered obsolete these days but I would not be without one. I still have a lot of valuable software such as Microsoft Office on DVDs. I also find them useful for keeping odd bits of software. I can label a CD and find it again. Knowing that it's on one of the boxful of USB drives that are kicking about is far less convenient.

I would go for the best new machine to fit your requirements without worrying whether it has a DVD drive but buy an external one if there's not one inbuilt. If you're used to having one you will surely miss it.

 

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shutter
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Re: DVD Drive

@Strat  I got one of the external USB DVD drives from ebay.... BUT>>>>>>  be careful and read the descriptions.... some are only selling the case.. or the connecting cable.

I needed one to put some progs I have only on CD Rom discs, on to my 10" laptop,  ( including Windows 7 Pro)... so it was well worth the money, and, always there should you need it for other stuff.... e.g. old cd roms with pics or music file on them...

Especially useful if you want to try a "live cd" with Linux, or any other similar "live" O.S..... although it is possible to put them straight on to a USB stick nowadays.

 

ReedRichards
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Re: DVD Drive

Don't we stream everything these days and therefore have no need for physical media?  That's the way it's supposed to be now.

shutter
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Re: DVD Drive

It`s very difficult to "stream"  Microsoft Publisher 98, as it is only available ( or was  when it came out ) on a CD !.

seems strange that I have been using this program for 20 years, and it is still the best program for me to use for documents.  Yes, I do have Open Office, but prefer MSPub 98  . !  that is why I got myself the USB external CD Drive.

 I also have about 8 other progs I use, only available on CD... My life would be very difficult without them ! ! ! ..

 

daveplus
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Re: DVD Drive

There are a few web sites that collect very old software

Baldrick1
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Re: DVD Drive

Not everyone has the budget to download or stream the latest software, especially if they already own a perfectly functional version on DVD or CD. Also some of us do not wish private information to be given to third parties to store 'in the cloud' .

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VileReynard
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Re: DVD Drive

Virtually all Desktops have an optical drive.

Read-only Blu-ray with read/write DVD/CD capabilities are fairly cheap.

You can store private information in the cloud, for a short while, provided it is carefully encrypted.
Your cloud storage provider may cease your backup at any time.

The other alternative is to provide your own storage on external disk(s).

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nanotm
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Re: DVD Drive


@steveocee wrote:

You are in fact behind the times! (Sorry)

Optical media is only really kept alive these days by DVD with a small percentage being Blu-Ray.

You can pick up an external USB DVD drive these days for £10 form Amazon should you still need the functionality but as more things now go to streamed media, downloaded apps and cloud based utilities they are virtually redundant.

The last 4 PC's I built had no optical drive at all.


I have built both wiht and without, the primary difference being what its used for,

for me a disc drive would be essential for a number of reasons, not least of which being the ability to burn backups to non volatile media (something that wont randomly "forget" whats stored on it when subjected to an electromagnetic surge)  and a very close second being for watching the hundreds of movies I have on discs at home, now I used to have some nifty software that could create digital backups for me and allow me to leave all the physical discs at home whilst I just carried around a hard drive but the old drive died a death and the legality of doing so changed.... and since I already spent thousands building that movie collection i'm more inclined to just pay a few quid to buy a new drive than spend almost as much again in order to be permitted to stream said movies.... not to mention the fact I can also create discs from all the content the family creates for posterity as well ...

you might not personally have a use for a dvd/Blu-ray drive but lots of other people do 

 

 @Strat

one thing to take account of is the hardware specs of the machines where you could add on an external drive, its been my experience that a lot of them are missing the necessary hardware (unless your going for a gaming laptop with a decent gfx card or one of the higher end APU's with the rx chipset) for disc playback, this causes problems if your then trying ot use the machine for the purpose...

for one of the kids as an upgrade I got them a hp spectra with an external usb3.0 Blu-ray multi drive, great for use on trains or in the  bedroom watching movies but still useful for tasks when out and about as well 

 

 

 

just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
22over7
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Re: DVD Drive

This is a really interesting topic.  

 

The desk I sit at has drawers full of: magtape, of various kinds; floppy disks;  (C|DV)Ds; god-knows-what. In my bookshelves are huge line-printer-binders, and I'm pretty sure I have some punched-cards somewhere, if not paper-tape spools.

I won't mention, yes I will, the drawer-fulls of wall-warts that might have powered some of the gadgets that might have been able to read these things. 

On the other hand, I have photographs, taken at the beginning of the last century, of my ancestors, that I can still look at with pleasure. I have masses of books, like the bible&shakespeare&whoever, that I can still retrieve meaningful information from. 

CD's have a fascinating kind of error-correction, that let's you scratch them with a stanley-knife, and still read them. As far as I know, there is no clever protocol that will allow you to read them again when your wife has made you throw them out to be bulldozed into landfill, or hung over the vegetable patch to deter the pigeons. 

I'm afraid what we face here, is a problem of "media". If the medium is the message, then the message is getting increasingly ephemeral. Even tomorrows chip-paper can still be read, when you find it in your rafters when your roof is being replaced. Say that for your DVDs!

To be sensible for a moment, I endorse the guy below who said: whatever, use a cheap USB DVD reader/writer. And I remind you that an old laptop with an ethernet port is very useful when Plusnet ask you to do a non-wifi speed test.

To return to my jeremiad, I suppose if we want things/files to last, we have to find some cloud provider who promises us, in return for a lot of money, that someone, somewhere, will still keep our files that our great-grand-children can look at, or delete, as they see fit.

 

It's life really. Moth, rust and technology corrupts.

 

nanotm
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Re: DVD Drive

@22over7

 

ahh entropy the death of everything Tongue

 

seriously though I migrated all my tapes to cd's and dvd's as well as retaining an easier to access copy on my nas drive, so we only need one drive and all 4 of the kids can still watch their favourite movie in secret in their rooms without anyone knowing they all watch the same film several times a week (although perhaps I should be getting worried that 18 yr olds are watching the same cartoon movie since they were 2 years old) so long as we keep a ready copy of everything in current backup media and hold a secondary copy somewhere else the chances of loosing it all to the vagaries of chance are slim,

 

as for what you can do wiht the discs, I have found they readily recycle into cheap mobiles for kids or can be heated to use in the formation of various structures (I once built a garden play house out of aol discs gathered from everyone in my street for a month, using nothing more than a heat gun and several hours, stupid thing lasted 5 years and survived several house moves before we gave it away to someone after our kids grew out of it) although they are annoying to reform the resultant structures can be quite solid not to mention easy to illuminate Smiley

 

but yeah I was slow getting rid of Betamax and vhs and converting it all over to digital, I finally got rid of all the old tapes a few months ago, some of them even made me money on ebay, but typical the day after I sold all the equipment I found out the kids had been hiding a vhs tape in their "treasure box" (well they have jobs so I politely suggested they take it to the shop in town and pay the nice people there the tenner to get it converted to memory stick, yeah that went down like a lead balloon.. )

 

just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
VileReynard
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Re: DVD Drive

I hope you've got multiple backups for those NAS'ified CD's & DVD's.

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Strat
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Re: DVD Drive

This morning I was browsing external DVD drives with the clear intention of purchasing one to slip in the laptop bag.

However I had a change of mind and will see if I come across any circumstances where I really need one and a USB stick won't serve as a substitute.

I'll see how things go.

 

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shutter
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Re: DVD Drive

@Strat  "had a change of mind"   or rather ........ being a Yokshuman......... Cheesy