DVD-CD on a Vista Laptop

[Mike Jackson]

Hi all,
Here's a quick notice for anyone with a Windows Vista laptop.

My DVD-CD recorder/player on my HP laptop stopped working on Saturday. I had copied data to half a dozen disks on Friday, so I was surprised when it didn't work on the road.

I stopped at Staples to ask the tech how hard it might be to replace an internal unit.

After a couple of questions, he told me it was a Windows registry issue. I brought it it. He plugged an external USB storage device to it which had the fix, and after rebooting, the drive was visible and active again. I bought the laptop there a year ago and they didn't charge me for the fix today.

He said he had been seeing the problem a lot lately. He said it was possibly something caused by a recent Windows update. He said it happens most often on a Vista machine, but I am not sure if it is limited to laptops or maybe desktops, too. I'd bet there are tech sheets online on how to add the lines to the registry yourself.

Having this information might save you some money and frustration. I was originally thinking it would cost me a new drive.

Cheers,
Mike Jackson

[erik winkler]

When having this problem, does the system recovery, to an earlier moment, task not work?
Sounds scary, everything is backed up at our place twice, but thinking about rebuilding all the software makes me feel ill.
Good to hear your laptop works again.