So my DVD drive died..

AGAIN.

I've lost count of how many DVD drives have gone bad in all of the HPs I've had. I've had HP's DVD writers do everything from scratch discs to not burn the properly to (now) not being able to read discs.

This replacement will be the third drive in this system.

So I get the replacement drive. It arrived today. Take it out of the box. What do I see? Deep scratching in the metal casing, the stickers are worn down and dirty.. ugh. Waiting for my case manager to call me back.

You know, I'd be perfectly happy with this HP if not for two things. One would be the optical drives that drop like flies. I've burned barely 20 discs in the 5 months I've had this system. It hasn't read too many discs. I just don't understand why they die.

The second thing is Vista. I'm not a "Vista Hater" just because its cool to hate it. I have the legitimate complaint that the OS IS much slower than XP in every respect. XP runs better on 512MB of RAM than Vista runs on 2GB. I have Leopard on my Mac with only 1GB of RAM and it literally runs 2-3x faster. Just in case any one is wondering, I have the dv6500t, 2GHz C2D, 2GB of RAM, GeForce 8400M GS, etc.

Anyway, I'm getting extremely tired of these DVD drives that die at the drop of a hat.

Has anyone used a 3rd party internal drive with any success? I know these drives are standard height and all of that. The only difference I can see is the bezel is shaped differently to fit the "Wedge" design of the system. I'd rather have a drive that WORKS rather than one that goes flush with the system though.

 

Sauron, the external bezel tends to be swappable
Buy yourself a drive from some corporation you trust and just attach the outer cover of your choice.

 

Yeah I'm going to have to do that. I'm tired of these drives dying. I wish they wouldn't send me a TSSTCorp drive. All of those drives have died on me. The other drives made by LG have always been reliable. But every time I finally got one of those in my HP, the motherboard went bad and the system ended up being replaced. I can't win. I'd like to find a nice slot loading drive.

 

wow sorry about the DVD drive mishaps. i dont like Vista either because its a hog

 

Wow that's a lot of bad dvd drives. I've burned ~200+ dvd's and mine is still running great. What drive did they send you this last time? How can the drive be dirty?? Did they pull a used unit off a returned laptop and then box it up and send it to you??!

As far as the old xp/vista debate...I've got both so either way I win

-Reby

 

Thats what happens when you use parts built by the lowest bidder! haha.

I see some nice Lite-On and Pioneer drives that might be good replacements. Might just get HP to replace this and get a good desktop burner + USB external enclosure.

I really want to go back to XP. Tired of Vista. But I can't switch OSes if my system can't read the discs!

 

When my last drive went out I bought a Pioneer slot loading DVDRW DL from mwave.com, It's lasted a year so far and with a slot loader you don't need to worry about the bezel matching up.