Which Type of external CD/DVD For Laptop

kah22

I'm replacing a broken laptop cd/dvd player with an external CD/DVD-RW and will probably buy of Ebay. I've also been looking at Blu Ray options

Regarding Blu Ray I see a number on there described broadly as:
USB 2.0 Slim External CD / DVD RW - Blu-Ray ROM Drive Burner Writer Drive-UK

There is not much difference price wise between them and the normal External CD/DVD RW drive and I was wondering what actual difference will blu ray make, and why.

I'm also wondering if blu ray will actually work with my Dell Inspiron laptop, my nephew is going to wipe the old hard drive and install extra memory for me so I'd like to get the system back to some sort of shape.

In all honesty I can't see the drive been used for much more than loading on new programs I may get, or transferring music from CD to my Ipod. I haven't a stand alone blu ray play at home.

I've just bought a 1T external hard drive

closed

Have you read any of the previous answers?

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=57031541&postcount=2

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4120195

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4039641

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3993577

software, including itunes can make it appear like your internal drive is faulty, are you sure it is a hardware fault? what are the symptoms?


if you don't have and don't intend to buy any bluray discs, then there is no advantage to it, an internal drive is much neater.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/genuine-original-Inspiron-DVD%C2%B1RW-Burner/dp/B00AVVBWZA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360938137&sr=8-1

if your laptop has 4GB of ram already, extra memory (if you mean ram), is money you probably don't need to spend, windows 7 runs quite happily with 4GB, and (if you don't mean ram you have over 200GB of hard disk space free).

if it still has a factory restore partition, you can wipe it yourself in about 10 minutes (after backing up).

Figment

Why are you planning on getting an external drive rather than a replacement internal one?

kah22

OK thanks for the answers guys.

Why more ram? Simple: it's available. My nephew is a computer programmer (and he's a geek into the bargain:)) and he is constantly buying, upgrading and so on. He tells me he has unused ram about his house and that I can have it. He has also volunteered to do the backup, the factory reset and any other bits and pieces that needs taken care of. So why look a gift horse in the mouth?

Why the extra hard drive? Well I have a pretty large collection of photos that I'd like to archive, I've also got quite a few films residing on my laptop's hard drive at the moment and again I'd like to transfer all of these to an external hard drive. And I suppose finally I want safety of mind, somewhere where I can store important information for me. The advice doing the rounds seems to be: backup, backup and backup

As always many thanks for your answers

Figment

My previous question related to the replacement of the CD/DVD drive.

An external hard drive is an excellent idea, you can never have too many backups. If you are moving the photos/films to the external drive, you still need to make another backup elsewhere, as external drives can fail too.

NiftyDigits

Test the drive using a Live CD, such as Ubuntu.