Recently, while on a trip in Canada, I bought a Sony Vaio laptop. It was supposed to be a premium model, lightweight and thin, with a high tech magnesium case, built-in cd-rw/dvd-rom combination and came loaded with XP Pro and a lot of multimedia software.

I didn?t realise until I started using it that there was no floppy drive!

What?s that all about? However, the lack of a floppy drive I can live with but when I went to make a recording of a DVD I put a blank one in the drive and the onscreen message said no media in the device?

It was only after reading the book that came with the PC that I realised that a cd-rw/dvd-rom drive only recorded cd?s and not DVD?s. I had intended to back up the contents of this laptop on DVD?s and maybe copy movies.

Do they make DVD recorders for laptops or do I have to get a DVD recorder and fit it in my desktop office computer and link them together using a LAN?

Okay. Let?s start at the beginning. The last few new laptops that I have worked on, mostly installing applications, such as spyware programs antivirus programs and DSL, have not included floppy drives.

Last year Dell Computers stated it would stop making floppy disk drives as standard equipment on its higher end desktop personal computers. I haven?t yet seen a new desktop computer without a floppy drive but I expect it to happen quite soon

Sony introduced the 3.5-inch floppy diskette in 1980 with a capacity of 1.44 megabytes, and by the early 1990s it had become the standard method of data transfer in PCs.

Tens of millions of computer users are familiar with ?the a: prompt? as the symbol for the floppy diskette. Dell based its recent decision to stop including floppy drives because newer technologies such as USB solid-state memory modules offer much more storage capacity than floppies and are more useful with today?s mega-memory computers.

When inserted into the USB port these flash memory units, which somewhat resemble a disposable cigarette lighter in shape and size, are read by the computer in the same manner as a floppy or any other kind of drive. The benefit is that this new technology offers much more capacity ? instead of just 1.44 megabytes, at the low end these miniature devices with no moving parts can contain 128 megabytes of data all the way up to two gigabytes.

In the early days of computing, hard drives of ten to 20 megabytes, just the capacity of a few floppy disks, were common, and the size of computer programs was often small enough to fit on one or two floppies.

However, even the less well-equipped computers today include hard drives many hundreds of times larger than that, and most programs or even MP3 music files and photographs are too large to run or store on a manageable number of floppy disks.

Apparently Dell research showed that when customers from focus groups were asked if they felt they needed a floppy they would continue to say yes but when asked how long it had been since they had actually used one, they would typically answer, six months to a year. Many couldn?t remember the last time they used the floppy drive.

If you really find that you have a definite need for an external floppy drive it?s still possible to buy one which can connect to your new laptop through a USB port. You can get one at PC Parts on Church Street for $80.

But it?s probably time to move away from floppies. Look through your collection and once you have eliminated the boot start-up disks that don?t apply any more and the DOS utilities that you can?t use anyway, since XP is no longer DOS based, what else is left that can fit in a 1.44 mb space (the capacity of a floppy) that you are still going to need? Transfer your old stuff to CD-RW, run it through a virus checker and you?ll be fine.

As far as the confusion over what you can record using a cd-rw/dvd-rom drive, I know a lot of people who get mixed up with that drive description and think that they have lucked out and will now be able to make copies of DVD?s and enjoy the comparatively large capacity of the DVD medium. But, as you have found out, ?cd-rw/dvd-rom? means that you can play and record cd?s but you can only PLAY DVD?s and not record on them. That?s why you?re drive reported that it had no media inserted, a blank DVD is probably not recognised by a CD recorder drive.

I haven?t yet seen a laptop with a DVD recorder built into it although I do see one listed on the Internet for use in a Dell laptop. I wouldn?t try to fit that one into your Sony. On their computer site Sony lists an external DVD recorder drive which you could order for $500, on top of that of course you?re going to have to pay import duty.

However, I can tell you of a neat solution that probably won?t cost you much more than replacing the drive on your laptop.

You could buy a full-size DVD recorder in town (make sure it?s dual format) and fit it into an external USB 2 drive case. It?s not difficult to do at all. The total cost of the external drive case and the DVD recorder combination would be about $320. That way you could connect this externally powered unit to the USB2 port on your new laptop, or any other USB2 port on a computer, and use it to back up the contents using the software that comes bundled with the DVD recorder. You could also in turn plug it into your desktop computer and either transfer information or back that one up too. Obviously, you would first have to install the backup software on that machine as well. If your desktop computer is a bit older and lacks USB2 ports you could add them easily enough by installing a PCI USB2 expansion port card, available in Hamilton for under $40. USB2 potentially transfers data at up to 40 times the speed that USB1 ports work at, which is a significant improvement and definitely worth thinking about.