[seg9585]

Just curious -- when assembling this build, what trade off led to the design decision not to include an optical disk drive? Many small laptops removed them to make the profile of the computer smaller, but these builds usually just sit under a desk.
Seeing that a significant amount of software is still distributed on disk, it seems an optical drive would still be value added. People who buy ready-built desktop computers (rather than build their own) are typically novices who don't want to open up their computers and install new components. Seeing that you're bundling Windows 8, the novice computer user is your target consumer. Optical drives are very cheap so I can't imagine cost was a factor.