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After more than 10 years, my laptop is finally broken. Actually, it's been announced for about 2 years now, but all new laptops seem to have serious defects for me personally. There is no DVD drive and you can't simply remove the battery. I'm looking for a new laptop that doesn't have these two defects. The laptop should have an Intel processor.

I don't pay any attention to weight or any design things at all, and I'm especially not a fan of Apple products. The laptop should have as large a hard drive as possible, but the access speed on it isn't that important, so I don't necessarily need an SSD. In addition, a proper graphics card wouldn't be bad, but it's not a must.

To perhaps make it clearer why I need a DVD drive, I would like to install the operating system myself and then I would also be able to use the laptop as a portable DVD player.

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  • Does it need to be a hot-swappable battery? Basically every vendor has abandoned those; AFAIK the only option you really have left is the Panasonic Toughbook 55.
    – JMY1000 ♦
    Nov 5 at 22:47
  • @JMY1000 Doe it have DVD drive?
    – cnv
    Nov 8 at 14:32
  • Yes, it can be configured with a DVD or Blu-Ray drive (which should also support DVDs.)
    – JMY1000 ♦
    Nov 8 at 15:35
  • @JMY1000 So it has both DVD drive and removable battery?
    – cnv
    Nov 10 at 21:44
  • Yes, the removable battery is also hot swappable.
    – JMY1000 ♦
    Nov 11 at 5:56

2 Answers 2

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Panasonic ToughBook

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As far as I'm aware, the Panasonic ToughBook series is the last remaining line of laptops that offers user swappable batteries (i.e. you can change the battery without disassembling the laptop.) Both the ToughBook 40 and ToughBook 55 models offer DVD and Blu-Ray drives.

Intended as ruggedized "do-everything" laptops, these guys boast just about every type of I/O, along with IP54/66 water/dust and MIL-STD-810H/MIL-STD-461G environmental ratings (for the 55 and 40 respectively.) They also come with the thickness and price tags to match—these are not consumer-friendly thin-and-light laptops. For reference, the cheapest SKU with a DVD drive and Wi-Fi is the FZ-55FZ-1QAM, at a whopping $4,381—and that's without a second battery. The version with a Blu-Ray drive, the FZ-55FZ065AM, has an MSRP of $4,723. However, if you really want that swappable battery, it's your only option left. That said, I would ask you to consider if you could use an external DVD drive and a battery bank; it would probably be cheaper and lighter, provide a more versatile and performant experience, and be more pleasant to use day-to-day.

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  • Yea forgot that this exists when I wrote my answer. But if you go for external DVD drive then my option is pretty good since that also has a user-replacable battery, although you do have to open it up to replace it
    – Irsu85
    Nov 13 at 8:55
  • External DVD drive and a battery bank would be defenetly cheaper but not lighter. External devices are defenetly not good for portability. Also what the battery bank should be googd for if there is already a built-in battery?
    – cnv
    Nov 15 at 16:01
  • If you want it to be internal, then the ToughBook is your best (and only) option! Please mark the answer as accepted if this works for you.
    – JMY1000 ♦
    Nov 16 at 3:34
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    Because of the price, can´t say if it really works for me, but if it really has both DVD drive and removable battery, it seems too be the only answer, so have acepted it. In theory an other posibility could be to replace the board, processor, RAM, etc. from the old laptop, but gues asking something like this could be off topic.
    – cnv
    Nov 16 at 13:16
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New laptops in 2023 just don't have a DVD drive anymore, that's outdated and bulky, so if you want that you need to go external or go with an old laptop.

As for the removable battery, there is actually a really nice laptop that has this feature, it's called the Framework. It meets all of your requirements, having the ability to have a really big storage drive (SSD because that's how laptops are right now, easily up to 2TB and you can technically go even bigger), has an Intel CPU (except if you choose the AMD variant) and they have released a version with an AMD dedicated GPU a while back.

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  • The battery on the Framework, while serviceable, isn't hot-swappable and requires disassembly. Plenty of laptops have serviceable batteries (e.g. the current gen XPS lineup); while I like the Framework, going for it purely on the basis of a serviceable battery is probably not ideal.
    – JMY1000 ♦
    Nov 5 at 22:50
  • He didn't say hotswappable in the post, the first time hotswapping was coming around was in your comment
    – Irsu85
    Nov 6 at 7:03
  • "can't simply remove the battery" seems to imply swapping the battery without disassembly, as many older laptops had. We'll see, it's possible they just meant serviceable (in which case there are many available options, including but not limited to Framework laptops), but I think that might not be the case. The Framework is a good laptop though for sure.
    – JMY1000 ♦
    Nov 6 at 14:59
  • What do you mean by go with an old laptop?
    – cnv
    Nov 19 at 9:55
  • Old laptops (like my old HP Probook 650 G1) have batteries that you can remove easily and have DVD players built in
    – Irsu85
    Nov 19 at 12:17

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