Question to Teams about DVD Access

[Danny Diaz]

Teams,

National Instruments is most likely going to be distributing LabVIEW and the accompanying software in DVD format soon, instead of CD format, and we'd like to determine how this might affect FRC teams if we distributed the LabVIEW software on DVDs in 2008. Do teams have access to DVD readers, or can you get access to DVD readers, to install software from a DVD?

I know most newer computers have CD/DVD ROM drives already, and most all laptops also come with CD/DVD read capabilities as well. Team 418 bought a portable DVD drive so we could access DVD's from any computer. We'd like to know how many teams we may be affecting if we provided a DVD with your kits instead of CD's.

Please respond to the poll as soon as you can, we appreciate your participation in this survey.

Thanks!
-Danny

[Joe Ross]

We have 2 newer computers with DVD drives, as well as several laptops with DVD drives.

In our case, our older computers without DVD drives are slow enough to make running labview impractical. This may be the mitigating circumstance for most teams.

[Billfred]

To my knowledge, all of the computers my team has access to have DVD drives. (Matter of fact, every computer my family has bought in the past decade for regular use has had a DVD drive in it--I think you're more or less safe.)

[Kingofl337]

I would think adequate RAM would would be more of a challenge then a DVD drive.

[Pavan Dave]

For teams that do not have a DVD drive, check at the local Best Buy or Frys or something. DVD drives have gotten cheaper over the years. Right now online I found one for $79.99, but usually if you look over the span of a few ads (two weeks maybe) you are bound find one that is inexpensive that you can use over and over. Also DVDs are great for backing up data so they would be an investment.

Link to Best Buy's Drive