If you had a laptop, there was an optical drive in it. You may like ... The biggest one is the advent of cheap, reliable, fast, and high-capacity USB drives, cloud storage, ...

There’s one last upgrade trick we want to leave with you with: How to replace your optical drive with an SSD or hard drive. Besides needing an SSD, you’ll also need a caddy. We bought this ...

If you want a reasonably priced desktop-replacement big-screen laptop with an optical drive, the Vaio E17 is worth a look. But it's not a good Windows 8 showcase machine, and it lacks a touch ...

Take the Acer Travelmate 8481T-6440 as an example; it's a 14-inch laptop, sans optical drive that tacks on a bigger 84Wh battery, boosting its overall time away from an outlet to 11 hours.

Optical drives are bulky, so they were the first to go. These days, unless you get a 15.6-inch laptop, optical drives are rare. ... Size does matter.

The MacBook Air and the ultrabook come without a piece of hardware that's been a mainstay in laptops for a long time--the optical drive. Maybe because they really aren't that necessary anymore.

Take the Acer Travelmate 8481T-6440 as an example; it's a 14-inch laptop, sans optical drive that tacks on a bigger 84Wh battery, boosting its overall time away from an outlet to 11 hours.