F3JP DVD drive is FUBAR

My Asus F3JP DVD Drive (HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T10N) has stopped recognizing burned dvd's and dvd-rw and dvd-r and dvd+r, regular movie DVD's and game DVD's work most of the time, interesting part is that the burned dvd-rw, r's, and +r's, work fine in my buddies dell, i unistalled Nero when i first got the laptop and i never had problems with reading dvd's this started about a month ago, if i am lucky and i re-insert a burned dvd-r a few times it will read it, but 80% of the time it wont, i went and deleted the upper and lower registry values as suggested in the MS Knowledge database to see if it helps but it did not, now i am trying to find drivers (There are not any on the support CD that came with the laptop and or on Asus's support website under the F3JP download section, i am about to instal the Intel IDA controller driver to see if that helps. Can anyone point me to a new driver for the DVD drive? and or firmware upgrade? BTW it shows up as a DVD-RAM drive not as a DVD-RW drive interestingly enough, any input is greatly appreciated. thanks

 

a good way to test it is simply make a bootable dvd and see if the same problem occurs outside of windows. if yes you can replace with any other slim drive but it is a good idea to keep it in the same brand if you want the faceplate to fit