WOF: How often do you use your computer's optical drive?

When making movies for friends and family. It's much easier to give them and let them keep a DVD/CD than a USB.
Lots of people still use their CD players in their cars.

I use my optical drive an average 2-5 times a month.
Installing Windows, giving away movies, pictures, music and software.

I think they should have more laptops that sell with an external USB Optical drive as an option in favour of better cooling or more USB ports.

I just looked and I have my windows install disk in their from my reinstall in October. I use steam for every game I have now. Although, I plan on buying a hard copy of Crysis 2 though and want to activate it on steam.

Its becoming useless to be honest.

I use mine maybe once or twice a week. I've used Lite-On ODDs for my most recent builds. I use it to start up my games, watch an occasional movie on DVD and listen to my audio CDs ( one of the reasons why I insist on including a discrete sound card in all my PC builds ).

I haven't used mine in months (6 or 7 months at that), infact I've sort of 'sealed' it to protect it from dust; and all reinstallations / installations has been done mostly using USBs, and to top it all for last few weeks I've been trying to 'motivate' myself to make a backup dvd of data.

I would get rid of my drive on my laptop immediately. As for a desktop i would like to have somethin of blue ray in there for a while.

The last time I installed either windows or Ubuntu it was from a flash drive. My vehicle's audio system supports thumb drives.

I last used my optical drive to burn a cd for a friend about 5 weeks ago.

I have to admit I'm guilty of not using Discs anymore. I either transfer everything from an external 2.5" HDD or USB. It's just more convenient and not permanent.

Actually what I like about optical discs is the permanency (and I don't like that they actually get corrupted with time, but I still trust them more than hard disks for some reason).

This thread gave me quite a bit of food for thought. I was thinking about buying a blu-ray burner for backup purposes, and I had to consider how I'm really going to use it. I still think I'll get it, because I can see several uses for it, but I have to wonder how much I'll really use it.

For a laptop, well I never had a laptop with an optical drive and my next one, the Thinkpad X120e, isn't going to have one either.

I find myself using discs probably on a weekly basis, mainly for media entertainment like ripping. Software wise once it's on my system I'm done, I may create a few ISO's here and there but not to often and rarely for backup purposes. Gaming wise well everything nowadays should be disc-check less or in digital form, so once it's installed I put it away in a safe place .

I've probably used the optical drive on my computer about 2.5 times since I bought it which was one and a half years ago. The half of a time in case your wondering was when I was going to use it but then couldn't find the CD i was looking for. Thought I should add that in because I actual had a use for it. When I go to build my next system I think I will include one even though I probably wont use it. They are so cheep now that its worth 20 bucks to have one in case I need it.

I still use mine several times a day. Same with our Media and Office Admin departments. Optical drives still form a major part of our day to day data use.

I use mine fairly often - several years ago I started building a library of movies and audiobooks off Usenet. DVD-R blanks are cheap, nonvolatile and nonmagnetic. They may not last forever but nothing does. They'll last longer than I will. I have a pretty good library now, and I don't really trust flash drives. Plus, they're slow and hard to label. When USB 3 actually becomes available I may switch to external USB drives, depending on storage costs per gig. Or maybe not until another nonmagnetic, nonvolatile, price-competitive storage medium comes along.

Be it optical drives or the USB i use them 24/7.
For someone who works in the IT industry you can't make do without one.

I use my optical drives for ripping music and DVD's as im a DJ and i like to have all the physical copies of my games since my internet isn't that fast and sometimes spotty. Also when i beat a game the case is like a trophy for me.

I guess Optical Drives will be there for quite some time in the future, I do agree they are having a less role each passing day, and I mainly use my console Optical Drives (E.g. PS3) to watch blu-ray or play games.
I'm ready to drop the Optical Drive for my laptop/Desktop provided that there are easily purchasable/low costs/high efficiency External Optical Drives to be connected to these Machines. (& They are already there but a bit on the high costs)

Not very often, the Only recent PC game I got on disk was Battlefield Bad company 2 and after that was installed don't need disk in drive to play. The games I DO OWN and have the disk for I usully no CD crack anyway and don't use my CD drive at all.

I break optical media very often I hate buying stuff on disk.

I still use it once in awhile for: old games that need to be in the drive, share stuff with some people who don't have other methods, linux live cd, burn iso image.

I only use it for Operating System setup. No need for the rest.
In the modern world, yes usb-boot option helps but when it comes to the old computers some do not support usb-boot option. At this point it still is a must.

once in while wen am writing a DVD or CD