Optical DVD drives are getting out of fashion in notebooks these days. In theory, that's not a bad thing as it saves space and weight and one can always buy an external USB DVD drive for a few euros should one really need one. The problem is that those I tried in recent weeks are of such bad quality that they fail to read many of the DVDs and CDs I wanted to read.
Read issues often do not appear at first when inserting a CD or DVD but only later when I'm already halfway or two thirds through the content. Sometimes, a DVD that can't be fully read in one drive but works o.k. in another and vice versa. Sometimes a DVD fails in both but at different locations. Quite a mess.
But then I remembered that I have a 15 year old PC still standing around in the corner with 2 DVD drivers from back then, solidly built and quite expensive at the time. Despite their age, though, they've so far been able to read each and every DVD and CD that was partially unreadable on those crappy USB connected DVD drives for a couple of euros.
Perhaps it's time to convert my CDs and DVDs while that computer still works…
A good reason not to throw electronics away.