Do you need a CD, DVD or combination Drive?

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

PC manufacturers may offer a PC that comes with just a CD R/W drive or a DVD-ROM drive. A CD R/W drive will let you read and write both data and music files. If you want to view movies you'll need a drive that can read DVD since it 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 are available 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 because the features offered in drives is still emerging.

Recommendation:

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

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

Drivers

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

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

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

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