Do you need a CD, DVD or combination Drive?

CD and DVD drives are optical storage devices that use lasers toread and write data on disks. All PCs today come with a CD, DVD or combinationdrive (works with CD and DVD). Most newer PCs have a combination driveinstalled that can read and write CD and read DVD. This type of drive is calleda CD R/W-DVD ROM drives.

PC manufacturers may offer a PC that comes with just a CD R/W drive or aDVD-ROM drive. A CD R/W drive will let you read and write both data and musicfiles. If you want to view movies you'll need a drive that can read DVD sinceit is the only disk type that has enough space to store movies. Even a single,full-length movie is much too large to fit on a CD.

If you want to create your own movies you'll need a DVD-writer. These areavailable in a couple of types. DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW are the most popular.They can read and write DVD and CD as well. Always ask before buying becausethe features offered in drives is still emerging.

Recommendation:

At a minimum, get a combination drive that can read and write CDand read DVD. This gives you a great deal of flexibility. You will be able tostore and listen to music files, watch movies, and backup all your data on CDusing a drive that costs about $120.

For about $300 you can get a drive that can read and write CD and DVD. Thisprovides all the features of the $120 drive and adds the capability for you tomake your own movies!

Drivers

A driver is a special type of software. Whenever your PC needs to connect toand control a peripheral device like a printer or scanner the driver written towork with it is required.

The level of the driver needs to be matched to the level of the device it iscontrolling. Some drivers are backward compatible. HP has done a good job withits PCL (printer control language) by making each successive PCL versionbackward compatible with earlier versions of printers. This can save a lot ofheadaches for you.

If you lose a driver or have the wrong one installed your peripheral devicebecomes a 10 pound paper weight.

So what do you do if you need a driver? Try going to the hardware manufactureswebsite and looking for a link to drivers. You may have to click around a lotto get to the right spot depending on teh organization of the web pages. Onceyou do you'll need to enter the model of the hardware you seeking the driverfor. Then you can download and install it following the instructionm that comewith it.