Knowing What You Don't Need on a Laptop
Laptops generally don't come with floppy drives. Ditto for
Zip drives. If you want such a thing, you can always add it
on as a peripheral. But, honestly, you don't need it - and
you really don't want to be carrying around extra drives
with you, anyway.
Laptops also lack a desktop PC's internal expansion slots
because most laptops come with all the options preinstalled
(one reason that laptops have such a high price tag). If you
want to play expansion card poker with your computer, you
probably want a desktop PC and not a laptop.
Thanks to the laptop's expandability - primarily because of
its USB ports - you can add most any desktop device to your
laptop as an external peripheral. Don't be fooled! You're
buying a laptop for its portability, so you want extra
options installed when you buy the laptop. You can add on
extras later, but then you're tethering your laptop to other
things, which reduces the laptop's portability.
More important than buying a floppy drive (who uses floppy
drives anymore, anyway?), consider getting a laptop with a
memory card reader. A combination Secure Digital and Compact
Flash card reader means that your laptop can immediately
read the media used in digital cameras. You can even use
that media as removable storage and as a way to swap
information between two computers.
Don't be cheap and try to save money by getting a laptop
without a DVD drive. DVD drives can read CDs as well as
DVDs, so a single DVD drive is two drives in one. Where you
can spend or waste money is on the recordable CD or DVD
options. Some drives play CDs and DVDs and also record CD-R
and CD-RW discs. You can also find super drives that read
and write everything. Yep, you pay more for them.
By Laptops for Dummies
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