Ah. Smokers. We’re the last of a dying breed. In more than one way.
Anyway, for my brethren who smoke, I wanted to point out a good decision I made. My smoking ruins DVD players and such (hence a product replacement plan on my PS3 and so on). My computer and its IDE DVD/CD-ROM drives are not spared.
So, the drives start to get clunky. They have write errors. They skip when playing DVDs.
Today, I finally got something that will fix the problem for me. It’s an external DVD-RW drive by LG. It was cheap as all hell — about $60. It connects via USB, and it’s nice and fast, if a little bulky.
What I’m doing with it is the following: if I have a DVD I want to burn, or a CD, or if my regular drives aren’t reading discs, I trot out the external drive and use it (and try not to smoke for a few minutes, har).
When it’s served its purpose, I put it in a zip-locked plastic bag and put the bag on a shelf behind me. No smoke gets to it.
Anyway, it’s already proved to be easy as heck to use, it works nicely, and it didn’t hit the wallet that hard.
So, Marlboro men, there’s a solution for those frickin’ dirty laser lenses.