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.

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 ...

Conventional CD-ROM drives spin the CD faster to read the data more quickly. By using multiple lasers, Zen Research (zenresearch.com) approaches hard-drive speeds (as high as 52X). Only Compaq offers ...

Sony Electronics today announced an internal BD-ROM drive that can upgrade an existing desktop computer into a high-definition Blu-ray Disc™ player, as well as a DVD and a CD player. The new BDU-X10S ...

The dramatic announcement from Microsoft and Wang last year -- that anyone who purchased a copy of Windows 95 would receive a free image viewer -- led many to believe inexpensive imaging would soon be ...

CD-ROM drives will account for 42% of the estimated 188 million worldwide shipments of computer drives this year, followed by 30% for CD-RW drives and 19% for DVD-ROM drives, according to the ...

The GD-1000 DVD-ROM drive has a 4.7Gb capacity using single-sided disks, and up to 17Gb using dual-layer, double-sided disks. The drives are being manufactured now, but "demand is outstripping supply, ...

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 ...