Optical Drives Are Not Optional Accessories
I was supposed to order three new laptops for work. I initially spec’ed out Dells online which would have met the requirements and included a 3-year warranty and presented the figure to my boss, who was disappointed with the 1-2 week lead time required and wanted an off-the-shelf, possibly retail solution. This was 6 or 7 weeks ago. This gets worse.
Because of other goings-on within the company, ordering these new laptops got suspended until last week. I ordered three Toshiba M400 Portege Tablet PCs from CDW.com. The laptops arrived and two of them had damaged screens so I sent all three of them back; ruling that if two of them didn’t survive transit that the third one would die sooner rather than later. I decided upon Lenovo X60 tablets instead. These laptops arrived and upon unpacking one of them, I realized that the laptops did not have an optical drive ship with them, but they included a CD/DVD with some software on it. A visit to CDW.com confirmed this and brought to my attention that in order to add optical drive capabilities to this laptop after purchase, a docking station and an optical drive would be required at a price tag of ~$400 per laptop. An external CD/DVD drive would cost approximately $100-200 per laptop.
Now, I realize that it is my fault for not checking the specs on the laptop to see whether or not it had an optical drive. Lets be honest here; optical drives purely as an option are something that went out of fashion in the mid-to-late 90s. Ruling out LAN shares, PXE booting and USB thumbdrives, how are you supposed to load software onto a computer without an optical drive?
Here is another scenario which I’ll bet the engineers at Lenovo/IBM didn’t think of. Assume for a minute that you buy this laptop and decide, “Eh, I don’t need an optical drive”. Well, this laptop did not come with any kind of recovery media to begin with, let alone a method to install it. Instead, the laptop would try to burn it’s own recovery media. Without an optical drive, how can it do that?
There’s quite a few Lenovo models that don’t have an optical drive. It doesn’t make sense for small business and home users, but for corporate users, it does. It keeps people from installing their own software (at least through CD) and reduces the cost of the machine. Corporate IT depts may make the case against optical also because the users don’t /need/ the optical drive to do their job.
I had thought about it in terms of enterprise customers. But honestly, I don’t think that it reduces the cost of the unit that much (at least in comparison to other brands with similar specs). In fact, given the price premium for Lenovo machines, I would expect them to have a super-dee-duper optical drive as opposed to none at all.
They should be able to boot from any USB Optical Drive. Just get an enclosure if you need to do maintenance.
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Having no cd-roms is very common and quite nice to have. Think about how often you actualy use your cd-rom. Yes they are nessary to have but I use it about once a week. Not having a cd-rom keeps the laptops smaller and the weight down. While in your situation I see the problem because your users expect the cd-rom just order two external cd-roms users will get use to it.
Its the sign of change cd-roms are on their way out.
I’m going to exchange the units for ones which include optical drives because getting external optical drives or factory accessories merely Band-Aids this problem. While it does make sense to not have an optical drive, it seems to be more of a hassle to have to cart around an external optical drive for those times when you need to have one. It wouldn’t be as much of an issue for me because I can get pretty creative with troublesome file transfers. But for our users, which have far too many PEBKACs already, this is a serious problem. I am working to make them less reliant upon me to do their jobs rather than more reliant. They will not adjust. As far as a sign of change, until software comes on thumbdrives instead of optical discs, an optical drive is still required equipment.