Netbook with Optical Drive Arriving from Asus
Sometimes we see devices at the CES that never get launched. Luckily, this isn’t one of those times. That ASUS Eee PC with the integrated optical drive we eye-spied in January is about to arrive in mid-April, says DigiTimes. It’s the same 1004DN we glimpsed during our ASUS booth tour and that integrated optical drive looks mighty slim.
You’re sure to pay a premium for the pleasure of a SuperMulti DVD, which should pair nicely with the new GN40 chipset and Intel Atom N280. How much is the million-dollar question. DigiTimes has the suggested retail pegged at 18,000 to 20,000 NT$ which works out to $531 to $590U.S. Of course, pricing in various countries usually isn’t a straight conversion and I’d be willing to bet that we’ll see this unit around $450 or so with the drive. I’m happy with my external USB drive for the oh-so-rare times I need it, but I can see the desire to have one of these if you want to watch DVD movies without ripping them to a hard drive. Yes, yes, I know: and for software installs too. That’s of limited value to me these days and becoming less and less of a reason to have an optical drive. I’m still living in a browser for the majority of my tasks and/or I can install apps by downloading them when needed. I’m probably in the minority here.
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I have been considering buying a USB optical drive since I bought my Lenova S10 about two month ago but have not run into a situation where I have needed one yet. I have been downloading and installing the software I need directly from the web including Ubuntu 8.10 which I made into a bootable flash drive for installing as a dual boot system with XP. I would rather not have the extra weight and power consumption of an internal drive.
I haven’t needed a DVD drive for about 2 years. With ISO images and the many free virtual drive software emulators (i.e. floppy, cdrom and dvd) there is rarely a need for them anymore. I boot/install almost all my software via flash drives these days. Get with the program everybody, it’s 2009 already.
In our work, we use cd discs every day that are sent/brought in by customers.
We process files and send them out on CD discs.
We wouldnt get much work done without a CD drive.
They are not dead yet…
Yes, well…
Does anyone know of any other 12″ netbooks besides the Dell Mini 12? I find screen size more important than an external drive, but all the screens seem so small for these 41-year-old eyes :)
Samsung NC20 is 12.1″ and has 1280×800 resolution…
Laptop Mag review:
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/samsung-nc20.aspx
You’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head here Kevin – I’ve found over the recent few years that the only time I’ve ever needed an optical drive was either installing software or for dvd work. I don’t have one connected to my 2133, but when I do need one it sure comes handy.
As you say though, each user has their own needs, and for me I happen to be a heavy apps guy and work with dvd on a daily basis. That means for my main machine an optical drive IS a requirement.
Thankfully for me that main machine is a new HP dv4. I can hot-swap the optical drive for a 2nd hard drive, giving me small but powerful 14″ notebook with dual hard drives. Using emulation software I can load up 500GB of ISO files on that second drive, and it gives me great flexibility being able to burn discs/install software or carry huge amounts of data, however I need it.
As far as a netbook needing a built-in optical drive, I’m not so sure. But an optical drive that I can hot-swap with a second, removable 2.5″ hard drive – oh yeah!
Been using my Aspire One for five months and haven’t had to buy an external DVD drive yet. OS installs can be done from a USB flash drive. All other software I use on it was downloaded from the net. If I ever needed to install a program that came on CD or DVD I would just create an image on my desktop system or share the DVD drive over the network.
In fact I rarely even use the DVD drive in my desktop system. I have disc images of most software on a 500GB external drive so in the event that I need to reinstall the OS, I don’t have to go through all those tedious DVD/CD installs.
When can we now expect the 1004 DN. It was past mid-April. Is it still on its way?
My son takes frequent bus rides to New York. I’m sure he would like to watch a movie on the way there.
woow, i like it, i hope it good work