Remember when laptops had disc drives? Here's when - and why - manufacturers decided to leave CDs and DVDs behind for good.

Although it is No. 1 in sales of add-on CD-rewritable drives, Hewlett-Packard is exiting that market so it can better concentrate on the emerging, and potentially more profitable, demand for ...

The 1.44-megabyte floppy-disk drive is an endangered species largely because its primary predator, the CD-rewritable drive, uses media that can store up to 700MB per disk and costs only about $100. CD ...

In the era of digital streaming, the market is full of wireless speakers that will play content from your smartphone or pull it down from the Internet directly over WiFi. But if you’re feeling a bit ...

When Apple announced new Macs last week, one thing that was notably absent from the new models presented was an optical drive. While Apple has been phasing out CD/DVD drives since the introduction of ...

My girlfriend has an old PB laptop (Athlon XP Mobile 2200+ vintage) with a broken (physically snapped off!) CD ROM drive. Windows XP (original install, 4+ years old) finally gave up the ghost. in ...

Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support DVDs and all the CD formats: CD audio, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates.

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 ...

So this morning a was about to check out disc 2 of Porcupine Tree's album In Absentia. Put it in my iBook and...it spits the disc out without even spinning up! I've had my fair share of problematic ...