XPS 1330 DVD Drive Question

I'm thinking of purchasing a XPS 1330 but I was curious what the make and model number of the DVD drive is. I have a large collection of Region 1, 2, and 3 DVDs and I want to make sure the drive is compatible with region free software. As long as the drive isn't an RPC2 locked drive made by panasonic or matsu****a, it should be okay. I would greatly appreciate it if a 1330 owner would open up their hardware properties and paste in the model number of their DVD drive. Thanks a lot!

By the way, I did contact Dell sales support about this but they simply reprimanded me for believing such painfully technical information would actually be available from the system builder. Silly me

 

I am nt shure about the specific model No. but i hace read in this forum that it will lock to the fifth region you enter

 

Yes, in general, your DVD region will lock the 5th time you change it, but region free software, such as DVD Region Free and AnyDVD, prevents the dvd decoding software from reading the region in the first place, meaning you'll never have to actually change the region setting. This type of software doesn't work on a small number of drives, especially the ones used in Sony and Toshiba laptops, because the drive itself features region locking. I just want to make sure of the manufacturer Dell uses before I purchase it.

 

It's a Matshi ta (same as Panasonic) UJ-857G. It's the same drive used in Macs. While hacked firmware can be downloaded for older models, I couldn't find anything for this new model.

I also read somewhere on the net that the person who was modifying the Matshi ta firmware had gotten out of the business, so there's little hope that the UJ-857 firmware will be modded. But I'm just repeating what I read.

 

Thanks alot for the info, I was really interested in this laptop but I guess I'll have to look for something else.