Louwrentius

I'm a strong advocate of killing the optical drive. As of 2011, there is no need for it anymore. Laptops could get lighter, smaller or have more room for additional battery capacity if the optical drive would no longer be present.

In my life, I never see people use the optical drive. And why would you use them any more? Isn't it so that if you are still using CDs or DVDs with your computer, that you do it out of (a bad) habit? And if you really can't part with your CDs or DVDs, would an external USB optical drive be a usable solution?

I think that we are at a point where most people don't even know that their computer has an optical drive.

With the release of the new 2011 Mac Mini, Apple dropped the optical drive yet again. They first dropped it from the MacBook Air and now the Mini.

What is next? Well that is clear. New Macs will be able to boot over the Internet from Apple's servers. Again, no need for an optical drive, even for reinstalling your computer. I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of MacBook Pro laptops would not contain an optical drive. Maybe some people aren't ready for it but people should rejoice since it would make MacBooks thinner and lighter.

As apple killed the floppy drive, it is now killing the optical drive.

Currently, I am running VMware ESXi 4.1 on a test system. To manage ESXi, you need the VSphere client, which is only available for the Windows platform. Therefore, I run VMware Fusion on my Mac to be able to access VSphere and manage my ESXi host.

The trouble is that both ESXi and VMware Fusion use the control-alt shortcut to release a console. So as soon as you start using a console within the VSphere client which itself runs within VMware Fusion, you cannot get back to the Windows OS.

You will have either access to Mac OS X or the ESXi guest. And to top it of, the mouse just completely disappears on Windows.

To get arount this problem, you need to somehow be able to send a control-alt sequence to the Windows guest withouth actually pressing control-alt.

Fortunately, VMware fusion allows you to create a key mapping that allows this.

Within the preferance pane, the first tab is called Key Mappings. You can create a new key mapping. For example, I mapped control+q to control-alt. This allows me to get out of the ESXi guest within the VSphere client, witouth getting grown back to Mac OS X. As a side effect, the mouse also showed up again, which is to be expected.