New T550 - optical drive?

[mikek]

Buying my first laptop.. always had ones from work before. Fancy a T550... but I'm confused (and probably old fashioned) in that there doesn't appear to be an optical drive option... how do you load existing software from CDs? External drive? How do you reload the OS? Or is that a real dumb question in 2015!

Grateful for any observations on making the most of modern hardware... considering I learnt my bad habbits 20+ years ago....

Thanks

Mike

[rkawakami]

As you suspect, you'll need an external USB optical drive. You could probably find one that is cheaper than the factory recommended one.

ref: http://www.lenovo.com/psref/pdf/ThinkPad_WE.pdf <-- Western Europe PSREF
ref: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/th ... ccessories

[mikek]

Thanks Ray