Hoping someone here can help me out. My granddad has a Dell dimension desktop computer and his cdrom drive locked up. Can i pick up any internal cdrom drive, or is dell specific? I know when i unplugged his, it looked a lot thinner on the backside then the ones i see online. I wasnt sure if that woudl all be replaced and not matter. Thanks for your help,

Derek

 

you should be able to pick up any cdrom drive and plug it in... you should get new drivers with the new cdrom drive that you'll need to install...

 

Negative, CD-ROMs haven't required drivers since before Windows 95. So unless the computer is crazy old, it will be plug and play. The only thing to watch is the jumper for IDE Master/Slave/Single. If the Dell's jumper is labeled, just mimick it. Otherwise, check the wide 40 pin ribbon that the drive is plugged into. If it's the only drive on the cable, jumper it for single. If it's at the end of the cable with another device (another CD-ROM or Zip Drive, etc,.) in the middle, jumper it for master..

Someone say something about a geek badge in the HAW thread?

-Aaron

 

ahh didn't realize the drivers thing.. ..... last time i installed a cdrom drive was on a computer that had windows 95 on it.. ...

 

Unfortunately, I do it at least twice a month. I support over 200 PCs along with my everyday task of figuring out how to mimick BP's website .... except with 2 pages of text.

-Aaron

 

The computer is only a little over a year old and he has only used his cdrom drive 1 time. I have no idea why it stopped working. Thank you guys for your help.

 

Dell sometimes has proprietary stuff in it (motherboards), but the CD-ROMs should be easy to swap in/out.