We love that modern laptops have become so slim and light, but we aren’t happy about the disappearance of ports and features.

Optical drives are still practical for many users, whether to play old CDs and DVDs, install software, or create backups—especially with modern laptops, which are usually supplied without a drive.

I expected Gizmo Drive (free) to be something like WinCDEmu, which sits quietly in the background and allows you to mount images as virtual CD/DVD drives. In the end, that's part of what Gizmo Drive ...