Dell sent me a Refurbished DVD+RW drive, I need your help

Hey,
A week ago, I went through several troubleshooting steps with dell to find out what was wrong with my current DVD+RW drive, as when I put in my DVD+RW, the drive did not read the dvd correctly and it came up as a "blank cd" in windows. Any how, they made me do a whole bunch of "other stuff," and nothing worked, so that now, since my new refurbished drive arrived (dell sent me it), I'm afraid of just sticking it in there with the old drivers. Dell didn't send me a cd with the drive cd on it, and I thought one would come with it. Do you have any suggestions to putting it in besides turning the laptop off, putting in the drive, and installing the latest driver off dell.com? Do you think I should talk with dell? The old drive I had in there was a TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-L532B. Thanks for all your help.

 

All you need to do is insert the new drive and XP will detect it as new hardware. Then you can install the new driver. If your new drive is a Sony drive, you won't have to install a driver at all. It uses XP to get its driver.

As for your old driver, it won't harm anything. If your new drive is different than TSST, the old driver won't detect the necessary hardware, so it won't be able to match up to anything. If your new drive is a TSST, then it will just use that driver and you won't need to install a new driver, unless you want to update to the current one.

 

Drives dont need drivers.

 

i believe some drives do need drivers not to function but so the computer knows who the manufacturer is

 

FYI, Dell have a firmware update for that drive.

 

everything has drivers, its just that hard drives and cd/dvd readers and writers work fine with microsofts drivers and thus dont need drivers of their own. Installing new drives is easy as pie. Infact, plugging in things like memory cards and usb drives also install storage drivers too.