By: Logan Albright
It is always a good feeling when you throw away your old CD ROM drive in favour of a brand spanking new DVD player for your computer. Now not only do you have a much larger capacity drive, you are also able to enjoy all the new DVD games, DVD movies and much more content which has been squeezed into its 4 plus gigabyte storage capability. If you are purchasing a good drive, you will be able to take advantage of DVD-RAM discs and also dual layer DVDs, which give twice the capacity of the normal, single layered drive options. There are many manufacturers to choose from and in the market, very little separates them in price and performance.
You will find that a DVD drive is quite affordable compared to the prices a few years ago. The general advice is to stick with an internal drive, as external drives are not only more expensive, but they tend to give more problems due to the fact that they are not specifically designed to survive the external environment. But the choice is of course yours, especially when you have a PC tower with no more free drive bays to load your DVD drive or you need a backup drive to run different content at the same time or to perform DVD to DVD or CD backup and burn.
In any case, whichever you do choose, you might not always have a smooth sailing installation as other people might have. Installation of a DVD drive is actually quite simple; all that would be required of you is plugging in the data cable (IDE or SATA) and the power dongle to the PSU core of your PC.
Once that is done, your computer should automatically detect the drive and the indicator light should come on. For basic drives there is really no problem, but for more advanced solutions, you might be requested to install a driver for Windows to support other functions that it might have. This is especially true of faster DVD writers and multi function DVD drives that have remote and infrared capability. The common problems often include things like the driver device not being signed by Windows, or Windows cannot detect the driver or the file cannot be installed. The problem might even extent to the fact that the DVD cannot function and the hardware profile might give you that yellow exclamation mark, which would signal the fact that the driver for the DVD is in conflict with a port or another device.
These are just some of the more common problems and usually there is a single, universal solution to alleviate all of this and get your DVD up and running. The universal solution is quite elementary: Go to the website of the manufacturer, select your model and download the latest drivers. If the problem goes beyond that, contact either the manufacturer or look up Windows technical help forums on their website; there usually is a solution posted for you to get things in order. These are some of the common DVD driver problems and easy fixes to solve them.
