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.

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 ...

First is the hard drive (usually C:). One reason it is called a hard drive is that the data in it is permanent. In other words, when you turn the power off, the info in it stays there. The hard drive ...

Yesterday`s high-technology is today`s ho-hum. Three years ago, sealed aluminum platters called ”hard disks” for microcomputers were really high tech. With a 10 megabyte hard disk, the equivalent of 4 ...

These days, very few of us use optical media on the regular. If we do, it’s generally with a slot-loading console or car stereo, or an old-school tray-loader in a desktop or laptop. This has been the ...