Upgrde DVD to BD on M50 or other ASUS?

Anyone upgraded their drive to a BD-ROM? I see that the Panasonic UJ-120 can be had for $55 now so it may be a worthwhile upgrade. All experience welcome especially if you have instruction on how to remove the DVD-ROM on the M50. TIA

 

Check the M50 disassembly guide for more info on how to remove the optical drive.

 

Looks simple to do, thanks a lot.

 

Also, another important thing to take into account is to double check what interface your current optical drive is. I believe the M50 is IDE, but you should remove the drive and confirm before purchasing your new bluray drive.

 

yea pretty sure it's IDE and that's probably why the drive is so cheap as the newer laptops probably uses sata optical drives.

 

Ok. Just a quick note to post the result. Got the drive but was busy playing with it in an external case connected to a Acer Aspire Revo Atom/Ion. It's not till today that I have to send back the Revo that I finally got to try the UJ-120 on the M50.

Install was no problem, window detected and installed new hardware. Come time to play a movie and I get an Internal error. Using the same version Of PowerDVD 7.3 Ultra plays fine on my Desktop. Google the error code and it seems to point to video driver problem. Since ASUS have no update video driver since day one. I went to Laptopvideo2go and looked up the latest drivers. Install the 190.40 Vista 32 driver and the problem persisted. Finally rolled back to 186.31 with ASUS at the end and then it start working fine.

Well, that's about it for now, Got busy at work so have not done much, will play more tomorrow and will report back if there's any problems. If they runs smooth, it's a worthwhile upgrade for $55.

I'll also try to connect my laptop to the HDTV at the office tomorrow and see if I can get good playback on that.

 

Glad to see you have everything up and running