By Evan Ackerman
It’s unclear where exactly the line between netbook and small laptop is, but the Mouse computer LB-F1500W certainly blurs it by including an optical drive. Not just a CD drive, either… They’ve crammed a DVD burner in there. The rest of the specs are fairly bland, including a 1.6 GHz Atom, a gig of ram, a 160 gig HD, 10.2″ 1024 x 600 display, and Windows XP Home.
Is this a useful feature to have on a netbook? I have my doubts. There are certainly specific instances where having an optical drive comes in handy, but is it something that’s necessary to a computer that’s designed to be (generally) minimalist and efficient? It would be nice for, say, being able to watch a DVD while on the plane or something. But I’m sure battery life takes a pretty significant hit and the computer has got to weigh more and have a larger case, all things that netbooks were designed specifically to avoid. A much better solution would be to just get a little external USB powered DVD drive to have when you want it… And even with that, you’ll still probably be saving money over the $729 price of the LB-F1500W if you get yourself something better. Like, oh, I don’t know, maybe an MSI Wind?
VIA [ CrunchGear ]
As an owner of a Lenovo S10, I would love to have an internal optical drive. I've had to install operating systems 4 times on my netbook and each time, I have to pull my SATA DVD drive out of my desktop machine, attach it to a SATA-to-USB converter, and then use that as my external drive. It's a pain in the butt. But I don't see much room to install an optical drive into the laptop itself unless you increase the size of the machine, which kind of defeats the purpose of the netbook. Plus, the already mediocre battery life would suffer even more with an internal drive. If Mouse found a way to add the optical drive without adding to the bulk much, it would be a nice addition. One less thing to carry around with you.
As an owner of a Lenovo S10, I would love to have an internal optical drive. I've had to install operating systems 4 times on my netbook and each time, I have to pull my SATA DVD drive out of my desktop machine, attach it to a SATA-to-USB converter, and then use that as my external drive. It's a pain in the butt. But I don't see much room to install an optical drive into the laptop itself unless you increase the size of the machine, which kind of defeats the purpose of the netbook. Plus, the already mediocre battery life would suffer even more with an internal drive. If Mouse found a way to add the optical drive without adding to the bulk much, it would be a nice addition. One less thing to carry around with you.