Gateway NX860XL

So I just got a refurbished 860XL and so far I am loving it. There just seems to be one problem, and I am wondering if anyone has experienced this that own this laptop.

The DVD-RW/CD-RW that it comes with seems to have troubes reading ReWritable disks, the memorex disk I have anyway. The first time I put it in, it recognized it. But now it won't recognize it, sometimes I will see my mouse show the little CD icon next to it, and it seems like the drive makes somewhat of an odd noise. Then I had to ctl+alt+del and close "my computer" since it wasn't responding when I tried to open the media by clicking on the drive in "my computer." I then ejected the disk and the computer seemed to come back to normal. Then when I put in a normal CD/DVD it would make that louder noise (kind of like a clicking, spinning, sound). So I would restart and then try the normal disk and it worked fine. I switched out a few normal disks, DVD and CD and they all worked great! Then did the ReWritable again, and same problem...

WTH does that mean? The drive seems to function, but seems to really get screwed up when I put in a ReWritable and have to restart for it to recognize normal media and function correctly again.

Any help would be appreciated, even if you don't own this laptop or even a gateway but have had similar problems elsewhere. Could it maybe just be the CD-RW and what is the deal with the odd noise?

 

Well I figured out the problem isn't with the laptop.

The CD-RW works in the original drive that I burned it in, but when putting it into the secondary drive, on my desktop, it had about the same behavior.

I couldn't find anything about the Gateway drives for this model malfunctioning, so lets just say I am happy things are OK.

 

Are you running Xp on it still or have you switched to vista?

I just ordered one, and it comes with XP but i want to put vista on it.