Lol to the people who say they need an optical drive on a gaming laptop....

It is possible to install even Windows XP/2000 off a USB drive with a little command prompt know-how. Even without that, there's a little free utility called WinSetupFromUSB that automates the process, all you need to do is point it to the drive you want to use and source (ISO for Win XP/2000, extracted ISO folder for vista/7). It works flawlessly.

Fact is that the need for internal optical drives reduces by the day and I'd rather have an extra USB port or 2, than an optical drive especially if there is an msata slot available on the laptop. I cannot count the number of times I've had the lens of an optical drive degrade on me. After some time they start being selective with what they work with and eventually die. The fewer cheap mechanical parts inside the laptop, the better.

 

There's no point to having an optical drive in a laptop. You can buy an external one. It's annoying how people are oblivious to this, and then the people who don't want optical drives don't have that many options.

 

Yay for extra hardware and cables to toss in my already crowded laptop bag when I'm on the go!

/sarc

 

Uh, how often do people even have to use it? It's kind of like the people who say they need a laptop, yet are always using it at home. lol

 

So you've figured out a way to take a desktop computer and use it while sitting on your couch, then take it to your bedroom, and later your kitchen? Do tell.

 

I can. Four. That's how many laptops I've owned (all with optical drives thus far). And they don't crap out on me after a couple years, but after a couple uses.

Why don't I want an optical drive on a laptop? Because it's not going to work when I need it anyway. That I rarely need it is peripheral.

 

What if I want to watch a movie? Sure I can use netflix, but I have like 50+ amounts of good movies. Sometimes Netflix service has the movie quality like 240p - 360p due to my internet speed and I would hate to have a lot of buffering or waiting for the movie to load entirely, so most of the time I watch them on DVD by using the CD/DVD Drive.

 

Netflix and Hulu combined still have a crap selection of movies. I can never find the ones I want to watch, especially newer ones. And forget about DVD. Nothing compares with actual blu-ray quality video. There is no streaming service that comes close to the fidelity of blu-ray. For smaller laptops, it makes sense to dump the optical drive, but for 15" and larger unless they're looking to be "thin and light" I say why not add the optical drive bay.

 

Blu-ray has bitter taste for me, it reminded me of how Telenovelas look.

 

I have a cheap external dvd drive in case I ever needed it, but havent used a disc in years. If I need to boot, I use a usb key, if I want to put music in my car, I also just put that on usb.

I'm right there with you in the "no need for optical drives" category.

 

If you used it a few times and it broke, and now you don't want one, doesn't that mean you do want one as you did use it, you just want a quality one? My old laptop optical drive is still going strong.

Besides, with some laptops you can get a hdd cage for the optical bay. Swap them as needed.

A couple of my cars broke. So no more cars for me.

Seems to me, some use optical drives and some don't. Both sides are right.

 

I'm sorry, but watching a good movie blu-ray or not on a 15", say 17" is the equivalent of playing Crysis on lowest settings on a 13".

What I'm getting at is that you either do it for the quality or for the product itself.

If quality is preferable, which it is for me, a movie ON a laptop with a HDMI stick popped into my 50" tv is something entirely else, and hell for that I have a damn DVD player... so out you go laptop with a optical drive

 

Farcry...
THX currently recommends a field-of-view of 40 degrees or less for a 16:9 HDTV and has developed a formula for determining the ideal viewing distance from seat to screen: Screen Diagonal (inches) / 0.84 = Recommended Viewing Distance (inches).

So watching on a 15", you should be 18" away, or a foot and a half. A 17" would be 20", or one foot eight inches. Now a 50", would be 59", or four foot eleven, just call it five feet.

This means that if you sit the above distances from the laptops, but farther than the recomended from your big screen tv, then the laptops will give a better expieriance. It is all a matter of perspective.

 

I have a bluray on my NP9370 because I just want to experience 3D movies.

 

there are still users that want an optical drive on a laptop, especially a blu-ray it's like having the whole package, which I don't find weird

 

Im the same way in my last laptop I downgraded the blu ray to just dvd to save $40 because I know I wont use it, and if I do it would not be often.

Sent from my GT-N8013 using Tapatalk 4

 

I do have about 60-70 games on disc. While I don't play most of them now, I do play a few of them or mods that use them.

I wouldn't trade an optical drive for HDD space.

I would for Tri-SLI/Tri-Fire in a laptop.

 

It would have been nice with a physical copy of the BF3 disc instead of this:
http://i39.tinypic.com/21nkuue.jpg
Not much time for gaming after that. I would never buy a laptop without optical drive, even though I have only used the drive in my current laptop about 5 times since I got it (dec. 2012).

 

Oh. Only 28Gb. On my internet connection, that will probably take... a week.

I don't know.. getting a blu-ray player on my laptop, on top of the other blu-ray player I have, have been one of the better purchases I've made lately. If I want a movie on my psp or my phone, I can rip it. If I'm at a friend's I can play blu-ray via hdmi.. same in the living room if I don't want to move the player. If I need to backup something and stash it away, it typically fits on one disc. If I import something, I can get the movie backed up without having to reset the regions, etc.

..so I guess it kind of only is good because I can circumvent the drm on the system.

Seriously, though - that's one major argument in all of this. Mastering discs has been, and still is with blu-ray, thanks to certain licensing agreements and optional security measures that have practically become standard, very expensive. You don't typically release anything on disc without adding a cost to the drm you are "required" to use. So dropping discs and moving to the cloud and whatnot, that's been motivated sometimes by the ability to drop certain barriers for releasing content.

Still - disposable storage is a good thing, imo.