Question

I have a Toshiba Satellite A105-S4284 with Windows XP Media Center edition. I have ordered my free upgrade to Windows Vista and it is being shipped to me. I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor and it says that it is ready for upgrade, minus some software compatibility issues and a couple of drivers, all of which are negligible since there are driver updates available... except for my DVD-RAM. Upgrade Advisor tells me that I must install it before upgrading to Vista and then to reinstall it after the upgrade is done. I have tried putting my recovery CD to see if I can see the driver, but when I put the CD into the drive, it does nothing. I put in the CD while on Windows. Do I have to reboot in order for the CD to work, or is this a defective CD? I don't want to reinstall Windows, I just want to check out the DVD-RAM driver so that I could reinstall it after Vista is loaded.

While we're on the subject, I haven't found any driver information on my DVD-RAM, which is a MATSHITA UJ-841S from Panasonic. There seem to be no Vista drivers available.

I'd like to know what has been people's experience here regarding upgrading to Vista, whether they've encountered this similar problem. Thanks!

 

What is the Upgrade Adviser telling you to install?

 

Sorry, I meant uninstall. Upgrade Advisor tells me I have to uninstall the DVD-RAM driver and then try to reinstall after upgrading to Vista. The problem is that my recovery cd doesn't seem to work when I try it out and put it into my DVD drive. I wonder if I have to reboot and have the CD run at bios in order for it to work -- or if the CD is defective. Plus, I don't want to reinstall my PC to its manufacture state, I just want to see if it contains the DVD-RAM driver.

 

Do you use DVD-RAM? I suspect the drive will work fine under Vista.

 

It would help a lot if I knew exactly what a DVD-RAM does, lol. What is it exactly? I've always thought it was the driver for my DVD-Rom.

 

DVD ram are discs that are used in set-top DVD recorders. Unless you have one, there is little point to having it on your computer.(i doubt you'll ever run into one of these discs in the wild. They are about 5$ ea, so there is very little reason for people to use them over DVD-/+r's which are pennies)

 

There are three different DVD formats of which DVD-RAM is one, the other two being DVD+R and DVD-R. DVD-RAM was the first. DVD-RAM allows you, once the disc has been formatted, to drag and drop files in Windows Explorer without using burning software. It also has better error correction which makes it a good choice for backups. It is supported natively in XP, I would suspect the same in Vista though I haven't tried it myself. If you don't think you'll use this feature, I wouldn't worry about it. Vista shouldn't need any additional drivers, other than the ones installed with Vista, for your drive to work properly.

 

Okay, that clears a lot of things up. Thanks for the info!

I guess what confuses me is when I go to My Computer to manually click on the D drive to run my CD-rom or whatever it says DVD-RAM Drive. I wouldn't want Vista to affect the use of my CD/DVD-rom and writer for any reason.