By the way, speaking of Fallout 4 (in the OP)....

Home sweet home.... LOL

Last year I bought a new pc and I haven't even added a dvd player :P

oddly enough ..ahem i have heard of accounts of people that dont care all they care about is portability the laptop must be portable and they dont hook a billion squillion things up to it
all they care about is ho wlong the battery will last

there certainly is a market for those uber thin things we are just not it
i saw an ultrabook with 2 usb ports and no dvd drive it was small and ultra lite with a gorgeous hd screen
but also rather limited

/thread? No way:
http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/c9/c9e1095062393a24dab581243efc2de1caad68a4a78377fcb4a8fe54472060f1.jpg

Get yourself a USB DVD reader. They're needed so rarely that there's no benefit to having one installed on IDE/SATA. And when you get a new computer you can just keep using the same USB drive without even having to go through a hardware transplant.

Don't external USB DVD drives work with such games? EDIT: Ninja'ed.

I'd be fine with my laptop not having an internal DVD drive, as I use CDs and DVDs so rarely nowadays. When I use them, I could just as well connect such an USB DVD drive (assuming they work fine).

And yes AOE is great, I have a soft spot especially for the first game. I've played it and the expansion through countless times, even though they have that awful save corrupting bug. I never figured out why and when the saves started corrupting, but I read somewhere it can happen if you save when there are missile weapons fired in the game (arrows etc.). So I guess one just needs to save when it is peaceful and no combat taking place.

At worst the corruption means you need to replay that mission from the start. It was quite bad because when the corruption took place, all the subsequent saves would be corrupted too, so saving to different save slots was not the solution.

Nice base.
I wonder why the dog/wolf head is bigger than the Deathclaw o.O
It's a baby Deathclaw?

I've also recently dug out Age of Empires and have been playing it again. While doing some research before setting everything up, I discovered a pretty nice mod called UPatch HD that among other things lets you play the game in higher resolutions. If you'd like to check it out here's the link where you can find it.

they work fine
my blu ray writer is an external

and i have several external dvd writers
some need to draw extra power from a second usb port
but most can run off just one

I think I should buy one anyway. I am not sure if the internal DVD drive in my gaming laptop is breaking up as it seems to have far more often issues reading CDs and DVDs, compared to my other PCs. Odd thing since I've used that drive very rarely, maybe it is breaking up due to too little use?

The USB DVD-RW drive would then be a replacement for the (possibly broken) internal drive. I don't feel like buying an internal replacement drive specifically for this laptop, it probably costs extra anyway.

Do you have experience if the common copy protections used in older retail games work just ok with those external drives, as they do on internal drives? I mean the 1995-2002 era games or so, the more draconian Starforces etc. probably fail anyway and I don't think I have such games anyway, at least not much (I specifically stopped buying PC retail games back when the Starforce complaints etc. were in their peak).

i have ran quite a lot of games through my external drives and they never gave me any problem
as far as windows is concerned the drive is internal
i never had an issue with transferring

and mechanically the slimline dvd drivers are just standard laptop drives in an enclosure

im pretty sure colin mcrae rally 04 and 2005 had some sort of copy protection and neither gave me any sort of issues

in fact the only one which ever gave me any sort of issues was dtm race driver which was ...annoying as well as the amount of hoops i had to jump through

My laptop's dvd drive stopped working months ago, which is hell because now I can't watch these:

It's not bigger. Not sure why it appears that way in the photo, but in game it's most definitely not bigger. Maybe because it's closer and higher on the wall? I dunno, but in game the head of the wild mongrel is not even as big as the wood base of the deathclaw head trophy.

Now if it's big you want..... you should see the size of the Queen Mirelurk claw. I had to mount that in another room of the Red Rocket.... it's huuuuuuuuuuuge.

As was the Queen Mirelurk. LOL. I was playing and when I first saw it, I thought "Why is a clump of trees moving? A glitch?" (It was nighttime). Then the realization that it was something alive, and then "WTF IS THAT?" My first thought was running, but my curiosity got the best of me. I was very fortunate though. I placed a bottlecap mine in just the right spot apparently as when I started firing and it charged, it got the mine and crippled a leg. Made the battle much easier.

I have a policy in each game of not building/placing the trophy on the wall until I've actually killed whatever it is (sometimes you can have all the "ingredients" to build a trophy head without having killed it) and the Mirelurk queen was the last thing and completed my collection... except for a cat head, which I won't ever place because I'm not going to go kill a cat.... lol, l like cats)

I've started about 38 new games, as when I die... it's game over. I just don't know how to role-play death.How do people who just reload explain all that took place from that last reload to the death? "It was just a dream?" "God resurrected me but could only do so XXXX minutes before the death?" "It was a vision acting as a warnning?" None of that works for me, and yes, I've had three games with over 100 hours each, that I started over when I died. It's painful, but it's also fun. I've had 38 different characters evolve different ways and it's always fun. Might not ever beat the game though... LOL. Over 1000 hours of playing and I've never gotten even close.

Fallout 4 would be the only reason to get me a new laptop^^
Be happy you panicked in vain and everything was how it supposed to be in the end.
I just ordered a new old laptop on ebay for all the old games I can't get running and the first thing that appeared to me when I turned it on was a black screen only displaying 'invalid boot.ini' and 'ntdetect missing'.
Well lucky me...And I bought that laptop only to not read any errors again :/

AWESOME!! THANK YOU!!!!

I played some earlier today then thought I'd try the patch to see what it was like and WOW, it fixed something that's been with it from the beginning. I don't know if it affected everyone, but for me, EVERY TIME I installed it and on EVERY SYSTEM I installed it on, there was this little annoying delay every time the music changed. I was playing earlier today and was thinking "Wonder why that was never fixed... still does it on Windows 10" and then applied this patch.... AND NO MORE DELAYS. I haven't even checked out anything else with the patch, that alone makes it AWESOME to me!!!

Thank you very much for that link....

And to the poster above you, the fixes list claims that it fixes the save corruption bug too!!!!