Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.
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We thought about that for a while, and just decided to leave it out. The reason we came to that decision is because most modern software is available online, and for the software that is on disk you can simply use the activation/product key from the disk package or an online source, and then download the ISO file for the disk itself which is typically easy to obtain from a google search. Once you have the ISO file of the disk, Windows allows you to right-click, and then select "mount" which makes windows treat the file as if it's in a optical drive and it will appear and load as normal. But that is for if you really need to use the disk and can't find a downloadable installer.
We realize the optical drive may be a useful feature, and we know they are inexpensive, but it's one less thing that would have to sit in the computer and rarely be necessary. It's not very often anymore that disks are really used with a PC unless you like to run DVDs on your PC. That's our reason behind it, and we also offer directions for the novice user to know how to either use the ISO file alternative to the disk, or even install their own optical drive with ease and we offer this info in the quick start guide in the product box.
The other thing that's nice and is the most commonly used, is that in most cases you can simply ignore the disk and get the online downloadable version of the software instead, which the majority of software developers offer. In short, we saw the optical drive as not being a really necessary component for a 2015 PC with the internet becoming a great place to locate software and drivers on the websites of their creators.