What to do if your laptop is not working

Have you ever thought to yourself, “my laptop doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive; what can I do?” If you do not have an optical drive with your laptop, then it is not the end of the world. You can still watch your favorite movies and TV shows, but you will need a few things to do this.

This guide will show you how you can survive modern life without a CD/DVD drive in your laptop. We will provide you with suggestions and recommendations to overcome the lack of an optical drive. You are not alone. Many laptop users these days do not have optical drives, and they get along just fine.

Get a USB external optical drive

LG Electronics 8X USB 2.0 Super Multi Ultra Slim Portable DVD Writer Drive +/-RW External Drive with M-DISC Support

View on Amazon

Prices pulled from Amazon Product Advertising API on:

Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.

Because of the decline in the use of CD/DVD drives, you can now purchase an external drive that plugs into a USB port of your laptop for under $50. Amazon is one of the best places to look for these, and there is one optical drive available for the $30 mark. This will be fine for what you need.

If you have a Macbook, then you may be tempted to get an external drive from Apple. This will cost you around $80, and it will not do anything different than a generic optical drive for $30 or $40, so don’t waste your money just to have the Apple logo on your drive.

For about $30, you can get an optical drive with many functions, such as CD reading and writing and DVD reading and writing. As long as these drives have USB ports, they can be used with any laptop. Most external optical drives currently on the market support USB 3.0 and USB-C standards.

With an external optical drive, you will be able to play your favorite music and movies. If you need to install software from a CD or DVD, then you can do that too. Recording data to CD or DVD is also possible. You can even rip your music CDs so that you can play them without the optical drive.

Use your External Optical Drive to Rip your DVDs

A lot of people have many movies on DVD and enjoying watching these on their laptop. You can use your new external optical drive to rip your movie DVDs so that you can store the files on your hard drive and watch them without a DVD player.

Although carrying around an external optical drive is not too much of a problem, continually playing DVDs and CDs will eventually cause it to fail. You should rip your favorite movies, so you have the freedom to watch them without your external optical drive.

It takes less battery power to watch a movie from a file than from an optical drive. This is another reason you should rip your DVD movies. There are different methods that you can use to rip DVDs to your computer. If you are limited with disk space, then you can use a method that compresses files. Otherwise, it is easy to copy the MP4 file components and audio.

You can use applications to rip your DVDs such as MakeMKV, which you can read about

here

. This makes it really easy to rip Blue-Ray and standard DVD movies to your internal storage drive. You can then watch the ripped movies using a versatile media player such as

VLC Media Player

. You can use this setup on a Windows or Mac laptop.

Get a USB Flash Drive

PNY 128GB Turbo Attache 3 USB 3.0 Flash Drive – (P-FD128TBOP-GE)

View on Amazon

Prices pulled from Amazon Product Advertising API on:

Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.

If you do not currently have a USB flash drive, you should get one as soon as possible. They have come down in price considerably over the years. You can usually get a USB flash drive (also called a thumb drive) starting from 4 GB and going up to 1TB. There are different styles of USB flash drives available as well.

You need to work out how much storage you want from your USB flash drive. If you intend to rip a large number of DVD movies, for example, we recommend that you go for a larger flash drive so that you can save space on your hard drive.

Using a USB flash drive is very easy. All you need to do is plug it into a USB port, format it, and save files. Flash drives are small, light, and portable, so you can take them with you wherever you go.

Final Words

A lot of modern services use a flash drive these days, such as the Amazon Fire Stick. Over the years, laptop users have got used to not having an optical drive built-in. This enables the manufacturers to create really thin laptops and modern ultrabooks. Not having a built-in CD/DVD drive does not mean that you will miss out on anything.