DVD burner upgrade for Presario 2100

The QSI SBW-241 DVD/CD-RW combo in my Compaq Presario 2100 (AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+ processor) has been giving me lots of problems lately while reading and burning disks (as these drives are famous for)! So I want to upgrade it to a DVD+/-RW drive.
I have these drives in mind:
1) Pioneer DVR-K06 or K16 (slot-loading or tray-loading with 5x DVD-RAM writing)
2) NEC AD-5540A (no DVD-RAM writing)
3) Samsung SN-S082D (5x DVD-RAM writing)
However, I don't know if they would be compatible with my laptop. The current drive is set to "secondary - master", so I guess a cable select drive or one set to the same configuration would work in theory, right? Do you know which one of these drives are cable select or set to "secondary - master"?
Also, do I need to worry about the tray face-plate? Is it possible that the default tray face-plate which comes with the drive would not fit in to my laptop? Presario 2100s have a pretty standard face-plates as far as the looks go, so I guess it's not going to be a problem, but I want to make sure before I buy anything...

Also, do you know any other online shop other than newegg.com, as unfortunately their inventory is quite limited at this time...

Thanks a lot

 

hello? anybody?

 

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Just an idea.. but how much would it cost to buy the units you are most interested in, then return whatever doesn't work?

Line of thought being, Time is money so to speak and if you spend $200 worth of time posting on the various boards, http://www.notebookforums.com/thread183594.html and you can return the items that don't fit paying just a small fee that might be more cost effective..

That being said a poster by the name of Ikenfixit might know.. http://www.notebookforums.com/thread181618.html

Face plate might be your biggest problem.
You might want to check the mfg's sites of the drives, see if they offer any dimensions, show pics of faceplate..


Just a thought..


PS:
Today's date 12-2-2006... so that makes the 2100 being about 3 months shy of being 4-years-old... so that means not many people are going to have a answer to your questions...

Compaq Presario 2100 series
Release date: 3/31/03

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well, i simply can't do that. here are the reasons:

if i wanted to buy all three of them, say from newegg.com which has the cheapest prices, i would have to pay $210; then i would have to open my laptop - Presario 2100 does not come with a sliding CD/DVD drive bracket - three times and install each one of them once to check if they're compatible or not; then i would have to return two of them for some 15% restocking fee plus shipping which would be around $30 - a total of ~ $240.
all this is apart from the time i would be spending on opening up the laptop, taking out the old drive, installing the new one, testing it, repeating the same for the second and third drives, then mailing the two unwanted drives back to newegg.com.
so if your 5 seconds of cutting and pasting a post in another forum (which i don't think is wrong at all since there are different people on different forums) is worth $200 ( you're probably bill gates ), then all this process would cost you a least a million bucks!
kidding aside, i don't have the luxury of spending that much money ($240) and that much time all at once...

now, the issue of my laptop being old: well, it is - i've bought it in August 2003! however, a laptop with a 2GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 40GB of HDD is still a powerful machine. since it's 3 years old doesn't mean that i should get rid of it and buy a new on because there would be less support for it; we're not talking about IBM PC/XT machines here .

however, my main question was not even about my laptop, but it was about the drives (that if they are cable select or set to a specific master/slave mode). the faceplate is my least of worries, since the current DVD drive has a pretty standard-looking faceplate.

thanks a lot anyway for replying to my post - you're the only one answering my post, i guess

 

Most of the DVD/CD drives should be standardized and they should be plug n play, so you wouldnt need to worry about the master/slave mode. The only thing I would suggest checking up first would be the current drive in your laptop. Some older systems shipped with a ribbon cable soldered onto the back of the drive & if thats the case then it is a pain to find a replacement cable. If there are no cables then it is pretty much as easy as sliding out the old & sliding in the new and Windows should recognise the ew drive and install the necessary drivers.

I havent used any of those drives so cant really comment on which one will work with your system.

 

i checked the service guide, and no there are no cables...however, i had read some threads on cdfreaks.com where people were having difficulties with master/slave settings of the drives they had bought. not all of them are set to cable select, and not all laptops support cable select (some of them actually need a definite settings, like 2nd IDE channel-master, etc.)...

thanks

 

I upgraded the combo drive on my 2199 to a NEC ND-5500. It worked fine. I think it was set to master, but it has been awhile.

 

that's what i wanted to hear thanks so much...

 

Sorry I didn't tell you what you wanted to hear.

Was just offering some suggestions. In some cases if you have a old machine and no one around has the same model, nor knows the answer it might be cost effective from a time prespective to just try the parts.

Really step back and think about it... 15% restocking fee plus shipping which would be around $30.... once you get your money back on the returned parts so that's not "that" bad....

BTW: In case you missed it I provided a link to someone who WORKS on laptops EVERYDAY... and at the time in neither of your posts no-one had responded with any hard data I think.

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okay, so i bought a Samsung SN-S082D from newegg.com for $64.00 (the Pioneer drives were out of stock, and the NEC one does not support DVD-RAM writing). it arrived today, and i opened up the laptop to install it. everything went smooth; the face-plate fits perfectly (Presario 2100 has a pretty standard OEM face-plate); the drive was recognized by BIOS and Windows XP as TSST Corp. SN-S082D

just wanted to post it here in case anybody wanted to upgrade his/her CD/DVD combo drive on a Presario 2100...