Archive for May, 2009

i have a compaq evo n610c and i am having a problem finding a dvd burner for my laptop that has a decent price and i am not even sure what kind would work on my laptop. i have already looked at the main resources such as tigerdirect and newegg but have found little or nothing. is there a online resource that can tell me what type is compatible with my computer or at least a ide dvd burner that runs 40 dollars or less that works with most laptops. and can someone explain the whole dvd + and – thing. please help

If your laptop has USB ports then any USB external drive should work with it, not as good as an internal drive but it’ll probably be the cheapest option and it’ll work. Taking a standard drive and putting it in an external enclosure may or may not work so you’re probably better buying a pre-made external drive (where the enclosure will be guaranteed to work). The cheapest drives happen to be internal drives for desktops that won’t fit in a laptop and can have compatibility issues with external enclosures.

As for the plus and minus thing, it doesn’t really matter all that much since pretty much every DVD burner can handle both just fine although in general + is better for computer storage while – will often work better in older DVD players that weren’t designed to read burnt discs (although most DVD players *should* cope with anything). The plus format does have some technical advantages over the minus format although the differences aren’t likely to be a very big deal in the real world.