Burning CDs!

Your notebook might come with a built-in CD-RW drive or maybe just a plain old DVD-ROM drive or worse no built-in optical drive at all (just like my Tablet!)! Notebook manufacturers will probably tell you that you can upgrade your current optical drive to something better by giving them even more money. They may also warn you about compatibility issues like not being able to boot from your optical drive if you do not buy the upgrade through them.

Well, at most, that is only half true because many notebooks can now boot from any USB mass storage device. That includes any USB optical drives. In fact, some manufacturers will just give you a third-party optical drive when you buy their "tailor-made" external USB combo drive.

That was the case with my cousin's Fujitsu T3010 Tablet PC. He chose to buy their optical drive and we were just shocked when he received a BTC optical drive instead of a Fujitsu drive. We could bought the same BTC optical drive off the shelf ourselves for a lot less!

Finally, it isn't an iron-clad rule that all optical drives from your notebook manufacturer will work well with your notebook. For instance, the combo drive that came with my Tablet works erratically at best. That is why I chose to use this instead.

An external Burn Everything drive from Sony! It handles everything from CD-Rs to DVD-RWs!

And I am able to boot from this drive even though it was not made or sold by Acer. So, thanks to USB, I'm free from being tied to Acer! Thank goodness!