which external cd drive to use?

Hi I am a total newbe here. Can someone post a link to an external cd rom drive I can use with the Windows XP version of the netbook? I am trying to decide between getting a one and a full laptop and the thing holding me back is the lack of the cd rom drive on the one (but I love the 6 cell battery life!).

thanks,

Jessica.

 

Any external USB drive should work with XP. I had a DVD RW from an older PC that I removed and placed in an external enclosure and it works fine on the A1.

 

Any USB enclosure that converts ide to usb should work fine with your machine. the important aspects are fairly vast and complicated and probably part of the reason no one has responded to your post. The first issue is the drive format. A vfat or fat32 formatted disk is usable by any system including linux and windows. This is of course assuming you have open permissions on this disk. A windows encrypted disk for example, will not be accessible on a linux machine or any other machine that does not have the encryption key or root permissions. The other thing to keep in mind is the files themselves. Any files you bought online from itunes are most likely encrypted and won't play in linux and possibly won't even play on your new aspire windows machine unless you import your user key. There can be other issues as well concerning how use the disk. If you are for example trying to boot with that disk the differences in hardware can cause that process to fail. I would highly encourage you to do some searching on the web. Most of the information you need should be readily available on line. A few hours of searching around will save you weeks of head aches. Happy hunting and good luck.

 

You could also go the very easy route and get a usb to IDE cable kit; basically, you connect any IDE cd rom drive to the cable, plug the other end, (which is usb), into your device, then connect the separate power adapter, (which goes from a standard wall socket to the molex on the cd drive), and you're good to go.