HP Envy 15 Owners, is having no optical drive bothersome?

For those who own the HP Envy 15, does it take some getting used to not having an optical drive? Any cons to not having an optical drive build in?

 

I can't imagine it's going to be too difficult since the last time I put a disc into my M1330 was during a Windows 7 upgrade back in October.

The only reason I could justify buying the external DVD was because of the $50 coupon HP sent me. It'll likely sit on the shelf.

 

It makes for a thinner, lighter, sexier, and cooler laptop. Because there is no optical drive, there can be separate cooling systems for the GPU and the CPU, which is really nice.

On the downside, I found it to be kind of annoying in the few instances when I needed a DVD drive. I installed mostly everything from an external hard drive.. I installed Windows 7 to a USB drive, and made ISOs of most of the games/dvds I could. Other games I downloaded online (like battlefield bad company 2).

It is a pain when certain games can't be downloaded or because of DRM couldn't have ISOs made of them... but honestly, if you use Steam, Blizzard, and EA Download manager.. you can pretty much skip video game DVDs all together. I have slow internet at school so I can't necessarily download stuff.. but if you can I almost see the drive as unnecessary.

If you can make the transition away from physical media, you should be alright. I found it difficult at TIMES... but if you have fast internet, you should have no problem.

 

just to clarify, i don't play games what so ever so thats not a problem

however, i'm worried about what happens if i need to reinstall the os, microsoft office, etc

 

External optical drives are around $40, and its worth 40 for a much skinnier sleeker system with 2 cooling systems.

 

Windows can be installed from usb drive.

Office discs you can just copy to hard drive and run install from there, no need to make images and mount them. Same applies to most modern software, since many of those check license code over the internet there's no need for cd checks any more. I wish more games would do the same too.

 

At that, once you install everything, you probably won't be installing again for a while.. so having an external would let you install when you need to, but you don't need to lug it around for the majority of the time you won't need it.

 

I've had mine for about six months and so far, I haven't missed the optical drive at all. I have to watch a lot of DVD screeners for work, and with my old laptop I might have watched them on my laptop, instead I find myself using a normal DVD player / blu-ray player, or sometimes ripping a few screeners to my hard drive to watch in .ISO format.

One benefit has been that the USB 3.0 port enables me to use a very fast USB 3.0 external 12x blu-ray writer, which saves a lot of time for work projects.

 

I bought the external DVD drive for reasons that have been lost to the ether. I used it when I reinstalled the Windows 7 OS on a blank machine, though I could have installed it form a USB thumbdrive apparently.

I haven't used it since then. I got my Envy 15 at the end of May.

 

cant even remember the last time i used a dvd drive so no problem for me