Optical Drive, Do You Really Need One?
Almost every day I read reviews on notebooks, and tablet PC’s and they lose points for not having an included optical drive. Sometimes they are even reduced half a point or more for not including a DVD burner, which I think is a little rediculous, despite how prevalent they are in regular computers.
So the question I want to talk about today is, do you really need an optical drive in your laptop?
Wireless Prevalence
As wireless gets more prevalent, being able to get online is getting easier and easier, though in most places it still costs a fair bit. With longer distance wireless technologies coming out, I believe optical drives will be of less and less use. If I can connect to a high speed Internet connection and download the applications I need, then what use is an optical drive?
Burning Discs
Currently, the only thing I use my optical drive for in my ThinkPad is to play the occassional movie. The only time I have used it to burn anything as of yet is to burn the restore disks that the ThinkPad does not come with. Had it come with restore CD’s, I would not have used the burning properties at all as of yet.
Multimedia
Being able to watch movies on the laptop is really the only thing I have used the optical drive for, but with hard drive sizes continuing to grow, even for laptops, I see no reason why many movies and whatnot can’t be played right from the hard drive thanks to many of the virtual drive programs and whatnot that there are.
I, myself, have watched many episodes of my favourite online cartoon, CTRL+ALT+DEL The Animated Series on my laptop. I transferred them all from my computer’s shared folder onto my laptop.
Conclusion
I do see that there are still some needs for optical drives, but I don’t think that laptops without an optical drive should be docked points in ratings, unless it is made for multimedia. You can function perfectly well without an optical drive. It might make some things a little less convenient, but you can easily manage without one, and had I the money, I would replace my optical drive with a battery that fits in its place.