POLL: Who uses the CD burner on their laptop?

[deejayshakur]

what the title says. also, do you have a regular desktop?

the laptop would be my mobile computer. i figure i can save $50 without the burner. have you had times when you've needed to burn on the go?

 

[jvarszegi]

I do a lot of programming on my personal laptop, and the CD burner is a decent way to back up my files. Aside from that, it's pretty damn useless. Note that 650 megs of space is pretty wimpy for a backup solution anyway; you'd be better off getting a 512m flash card for a comparable-sized frequent backup of your most precious files, assuming that your new laptop's got a card reader. Those cards drop in price daily, it seems. Long and short: I think you're making a decent choice to save the fifty bucks.

Yep, I do have a desktop; it's got all my most important stuff on it, and it's got dual drives. My most important files are on both drives. I've also got some external drives.

If you save the fifty bucks and you have files that need backups, a cool thing to do is wait for a good deal on an external drive. There are some out now that function as network-attached storage-- you just plug 'em into your home network, and you can access them from anywhere. Pretty cool stuff.

 

[ActuaryTm]

Very rarely.

Personally backup to a file server (unfortunately have really huge data sets to deal with) and occasionally external desktop grade drives encased in 1394a enclosures. For the times I do require a CD/DVD, resort to burning either on the file server or via an USB/1394a enclosed desktop drive.

Enclosures (USB, firewire, or both) are a rather inexpensive way to add the DVD/CD burning functionality at a later time to a mobile machine. Actually a rather preferrable solution as it utilizes desktop grade drives which are more inexpensive and higher performance than their notebook equivalents.

 

[Arcanedeath]

I use the CD burner on my laptop quite a bit, I take it with me often and I normaly end up giving CD's to people w/ Game Demo's or Drivers for their PC's as many still have dialup and it's faster for me to give them a CD w/ stuff on it than for them to download it.

 

[vegetation]

I find it useful for making various boot discs since my laptop doesn't have a floppy. I know you can do it from a desktop but still more convenient to do it "on the spot" with your lappy, configuring the right network dos drivers and such. Few computers can boot from flash drive and if you don't have a floppy, you should always have a bootdisc handy. I never liked the idea of using external devices with a laptop so if it were me I would cough up the $50.

 

[tranquilflow]

its a useful thing just once in a while. I guess, I could have done without it and could have relied on my friends for burning CDs

 

[DaviDaVinci]

depends on how often u share files. i tend have stuff that my buddies want all the time so it's pretty handy to burn stuff on the spot.

 

[Rainsford]

As a college student, I'm not in my apartment very often...especially now that I have an office on campus. So I just throw a pack of CD-Rs in my bag along with my laptop, and I burn CDs wherever I am whenever I need to.

 

[jamesbond007]

Originally posted by: Rainsford
As a college student, I'm not in my apartment very often...especially now that I have an office on campus. So I just throw a pack of CD-Rs in my bag along with my laptop, and I burn CDs wherever I am whenever I need to.

Yep, exactly. You never know when you'll want/need the feature. Actually, I use the internal drive for burning DVDs at home and I'll do CDs when I'm out and about. The CD writing feature on my DVDRW/CDRW drive is only 16x, so it's not too fast, but it gets the job done. I have an external 40x USB2 drive I use for CDs when I'm at home.

$50 isn't too bad of a hit, especially when you have portable CD writing capabilities.

 

[WackyDan]

I've got a DVD burner in my T42 and to be honest, I still burn most of my cd's on my desktop. I've burned/archiced data to a few DVD's via the laptop, but otherwise, I use the desktop.... And all my burning happens at home.

 

[nageov3t]

it depends how you use your laptop.

I use mine at work a lot, where it comes in handy. the only cd burner we have around is a usb burner, which gets lost between server racks all the time. it really comes in handy if I need to make a copy of a cd or burn something off of the network (we almost every Linux distro shared across the network... much easier than trying to download em off the net).

I rarely use it at home, though. it's a lot easier to use the burner on my main rig... plus, I don't store much on my laptop that's worthy of backing up. the My Documents and My Music folders are just mirrors of the folders on my main rig, just trimmed down to keep storage usage to a minimum. I rarely use my laptop for actual content creation, unless I'm doing web design, in which case it's immediately uploaded to my website anyways.

 

[rainypickles]

i was gonna use my laptop as a seconary machine, but it turned into my primary machine. i use the burner whehnever i need to burn. also, considering that my desktop has just a 8x burner, the 24x burner on my laptop is faster =)

 

[BehindEnemyLines]

Just once, but I like the peace of mind if I do need it for something important on the go. Otherwise, I just use my home cd-rw. It's faster and easier.

 

[Abhi]

I say.. get it.

 

[jdiddy]

Just get it, having a cd burner is a good selling point if you decide to upgrade in the future. I would'nt even look at a burnerless laptop if it wasn't a ultra portable.

 

[TrentSteel]

To be fair, I don't use my burner at all because I have an ultraportable with no internal drives. So I just use USB thumb drives.

 

[Slogun]

When I burn, I always use my desktop PC.

Haven't used the burner on my laptop in the year and a half I've had it.

 

[hytek369]

i do all the time

 

[videobruce]

If you don't have a NIC or USB available on either the Laptop or home computer (including the necessary cable) , how else do you transfer files off the Laptop?

Wouldn't consider one without a burner as one other posted said.

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: TrentSteel
To be fair, I don't use my burner at all because I have an ultraportable with no internal drives. So I just use USB thumb drives.

Same here.

 

[slyedog]

i might use a burner once a week, but they are handy when i need one. for that i have an external
cd burner that i can use on my desktop,my laptop and my ultra portable that has no cdrom or floppy