HP, Dell and Asus Consider Ultrabooks without Optical Drives

[Guest]

I have a big laptop now - a desktop replacement. I would like something smaller with lots of speed, ram, and HD and NOT an ODD. I hardly ever use it anymore. Even the boss uses USB drives. A built-in flash might be great for emergency booting - you don't have to scramble around looking for the disc that does that. Or an external optical drive, but it would have the standard optical drive interface for emergency discs. Or a way to use a USB drive as an emergency disc (I'm not sure, but I don't think that's possible currently). Find a way to recover if bad stuff happens and lose the optical drive.