The best laptops with CD and DVD drives are rapidly encroaching on extinction. Trust me. During my tenure as a laptop reviewer, I haven't seen a single laptop with one! Now that everything can be ...

Mac desktop and MacBook owners are used to living without a CD or DVD drive, but there are occasions where access to one could be handy. AppleInsider explains how to remotely access the CD or DVD ...

Hard drives and optical drives are the most failure-prone items on a laptop. They're also among the easiest to swap out, upgrade, or, in some cases, live without. Here are the best fixes for saving, ...

There’s a good chance your next computer won’t have an optical drive (that would be the place on the side of your laptop where you insert discs). For those already immersed in technology, losing the ...

Do combo movie-watching and music-recording drives have the write stuff? Apparently PC manufacturers think so. After a slow start, combination CD-rewritable and DVD drives are showing up in computers ...

Recently I became the mostly happy owner of an HP Pavilion dm1z. I say “mostly happy” because I wasn’t thrilled with its performance. To give the system a boost, I decided to swap the pokey 5,200-rpm ...

When you’re troubleshooting your computer or installing a new operating system, you may need to “boot from a disc” or USB device (like an external hard drive or flash drive). Here’s what that ...

Apple was one of the first manufacturers to exclude DVD players from its laptops, and the same quickly became true for iMacs as well. This meant that if you wanted to rip CDs for your iTunes library, ...

Optical drives let your computer read and interact with discs like CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays. While nearly every computer had them a few years ago, they're rare to see on new computers now. If you need ...