External optical drives are the least of my worries. Practically all computers made in the last 5 years, if not more, supported boot from external USB optical drives.
I used a slate tablet pc from 2004 through 2007. I never found the lack of optical drive an inconvenience. For the time when I have to burn backups of my data, I put together a $30 DVD writer in a $20 USB/Firewire enclosure and kept it at my desk. To transfer data, I used USB flash drives.
Originally Posted by UALOneKPlus
I couldn't restart the machines with CDs like Knoppix, UBCD, UBCD4Win, or even Win XP install CDs to try to fix the windows install.
A rescue partition on an USB flash drive is far easier than CD's. These days, I am quite a fan of
System Rescue CD. I run it from a 256MB USB flash drive leftover from upgrade.
Originally Posted by
UALOneKPlus
There is no magical way to automagically access shared network drives without any OS
This has been done since the 80's. The diskless unix workstations of yore had system firmware that could query the BOOTP (precursor to DHCP) server for its IP address and a location to download the system image. In 1999, Intel incorporated this process into standard PC design and named it PXE.
Today, many systems work over PXE. Linux can boot over network just as diskless unix workstations once did. Microsoft has a system to install Windows over network. All of this requires a managed IT infrastructure so you hardly hear about them.