How to upgrade to Blu-ray

Basic requirements
Adding a Blu-ray drive to a desktop PC is fairly simple ­ although it’s a bit more complicated for laptops (see ‘Blu-ray on a laptop’ later). There are two ways to do it. You can buy an external drive that plugs into a USB port or you can buy an internal model that sits inside the PC case.

Internal models are generally cheaper and surprisingly easy to fit. If your PC has a spare 5.25in drive bay, the drive can simply be slotted in, or if there is no extra room it can replace an existing DVD drive.

There are some basic PC requirements to consider before buying a Blu-ray drive. The first is that all modern internal Blu-ray drives use a Sata (serial ATA) connection to transfer data between the drive and the computer’s motherboard.

Almost all desktop computers made in the past five years will have this connection, but older models might not. If in doubt, open the PC case and take a look at the hard disk.

If it’s connected using two small plugs, one around 2cm across and the other slightly smaller, then the computer supports Sata. If it’s connected using one small plug and a much wider one then the computer might not support Sata.

You will also require a fairly powerful processor to get the most from Blu-ray discs. This is because the computer needs to unpack the highly-compressed video stored on the discs quickly enough to show it on screen.

Generally speaking we recommend having a dual-core processor, Windows XP or Vista, 1GB of memory and a modern graphics card to play Blu-ray videos.

The best way to work out if your computer is up to the task, though, is to use a free tool called BD Advisor made by Cyberlink, a company that makes Blu-ray playback software.

It is free and will check every part of your PC to see if it’s up to the task.