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    Successful upgrade to Blu-Ray burner on DV5t

    Discussion in 'HP' started by Spaceman Spiffed, Feb 21, 2010.

  1. Spaceman Spiffed

    Spaceman Spiffed Notebook Enthusiast

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    When I ordered my DV5t 14 months ago, I debated over ordering the blu-ray ROM. Though I do have a tendency to option things out, I passed on it not having any Blu-ray media at the time. That's not the case anymore. Given my annoyance at the trend in LCD sizes, and my laptop usage patterns, I realized I want to keep my DV5 for a couple more years at least, rather than get a new laptop, so it made sense for me to check into upgrade it.

    Just recently I saw this notebook blu-ray burner at Newegg and wondered how hard it would be to upgrade to it. Besides being half the price of ordering the BD-ROM drive directly from HP, it could burn double-layer BD-R disks also. :)

    I posted a question here recently about swapping the drive bezel, and got no response, so I went ahead anyway and ordered it. I thought I should share my experience in case someone else is thinking of doing the same.

    I apologize if this answered in a FAQ or previous post somewhere. When I looked around here a couple weeks ago, I didn't find anything so....

    In short, it was a real simple task to swap out the optical drive.

    One screw holds the drive assembly in the laptop. Remove it and the drive slides straight in and out. Remove the metal tab and 2 screws on the back of the old drive, and move them to the new drive.

    The optical drive bezels snap on in 4 places. Using a very small flat screwdriver or similar tool, you can loosen one or two of the plastic snaps and then pop the rest of the bezel off. You need to be careful to not break the thin plastic, but it's not too hard.

    The one trick is to remember to eject the tray of the old drive before removing it, and then putting the new drive in the laptop and powering it up and ejecting its tray, then removing it again so you can get at the bezels to swap.

    Real simple and quick. Windows will recognize the new drive and update its drivers automatically.

    It plays and rips blu-ray disks just fine, and I played blu-ray content on my 52" TV with an HDMI cable. I haven't tested the burner yet, but Newegg was nice enough to include a 25GB BD-R disk for free.

    Anyone need a cheep HP DVD-R DL drive to replace theirs? :)
     
    Spaceman Spiffed, Feb 21, 2010
    #1