My girlfriend has an old PB laptop (Athlon XP Mobile 2200+ vintage) with a broken (physically snapped off!) CD ROM drive. Windows XP (original install, 4+ years old) finally gave up the ghost. in ...

A cable used to send audio CD sound to the computer's sound card. When playing audio CDs, CD-ROM drives output analog sound to both a headphone jack and external connector just like a CD player. This ...

Most optical drives today are combo CD/DVD drives that support DVDs and all the CD formats: CD audio, CD-ROM, CD-R and CD-RW. The speeds of the drives are rated by their CD-ROM and DVD transfer rates.

Optical drives let your computer read and interact with discs like CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays. While nearly every computer had them a few years ago, they're rare to see on new computers now. If you need ...