Do we really need a DVD Drive any longer?

Yes and no, really.

As some have mentioned, music and movies are a nice thing to have on CD/DVD, as well as some larger apps (OS, Adobe, some games, etc.).

On my laptop however, I have used the CD/DVD drive 3-4 times within the past 3 years.. once for re-installing Win XP, and a couple of times for installing games. So for my next laptop, I probably won't need it. On my desktop/music player/DVD player, I definitely do need it for years to come.

I even installed Win7 on my laptop using a USB stick, as it was less noisy than a laptop DVD drive :)

As someone already mentioned...a hard drive is not the safest place to back up data. Backing up your data to DVD (single or dual layer) or to Blue Ray disks is probably the best way to prevent data loss. So yeah you still need that drive.

Maniaknl said:

pepsidude185 said:

Maniaknl said:

Ofcourse we still need it

How else would you install your windows at home ?
How else would you install your games you bought at your store
How else would you install your USB + Ethernet/LAN drivers when windows cannot find them.

Beleave me you want to keep that DVD player :P

1) Just what the post says... with a thumb drive
2) with a thumb drive
3) you dont need windows USB drivers for it to work
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I don't think the DVD players are going anywhere... as long as there still are DVD's out there to watch. An interesting idea would be to allow people to download movies onto thumb drives as well... but I don't see it happening. Additionally, if you download windows onto a thumb drive... and then you later need to use that thumb drive for something else... what do you do with the OS on it? You'll need another thumb drive... which is a lot more expensive than a CD :)

3 actualy you do some one installed his windows and all the usb ports werent working so he needed to use the good old CD to get those drivers installed

I was referring to the fact that quite a few motherboards let you boot from a thumbdrive. so the mobo's can just have the drivers build in.

As you said above though, keeping hard copies of windows around for errors like that can be priceless

sup3rsprt said:

I still feel sorry for anyone who doesn't have a floppy drive.

LOL i feel sorry for me too

Wouldn't it be awesome if a consumer (somebody who pays for programs, movies, etc.) could go to a walmart, speedway or wherever a kiosk might be, stick a specialised flash drive into the kiosk and it recognizes who they are bringing up preferences and account info and they could scroll through choices and pick a movie or two and download it to the special flash drive and its charged to their credit card and they could go home and stick it into their cable box or a usb slot on their tv or a small player and watch the movies they just rented and not have to worry about returning them because it is time stamped (and right-protected) and won't work after 1,3, or 5 days?

Blockbuster is making their own flash drive and operational kiosks and att's new u-verse cable box has a very suspicious usb drive on the front with no functionality and dolby digital printed above it....

i'm not quite sure what the original question was...

was it 'do computers need a dvd drive to work?'
or was it 'does anyone still use it?'

right now, i still use my dvd drive to

• install software (especially big games - can't download them all from steam overnight)
  
  
• ripping my legally acquired cd and dvd collection
  
  
• burning discs (believe it or not) to play on non-pc hi-fi or tv systems
  
  
• backing up stuff

i do like the idea of installing everything off a usb stick - i copied my windows install onto one for example -and maybe sometime in the future we will be able to buy/install software that way - but for now, blank dvds are so cheap, compared to a 4 or 8 gig usb stick.

how many years will it be until we see polls entitled 'do we really need usb sticks any longer?'