buying & fitting CD RW drive

C

Caveat

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Have inherited a really good, powerful PC - but only 1 CD drive.

I'm not technical at all - is it easy to fit one of these into a free bay? I'm guessing it kind of just slots in, install drivers and away you go?

Also, if anyone has any recommendation as regards brand/make, that would be helpful.

Thanks
 
Having recently (successfully) installed a heat sink and fan and an internal HD on a laptop, I would say that a CD/DVD drive shouldn't cause much of a problem.
 
. It's not that difficult but I did want to alert you to some pertinent issues. The first link currently in those Google search results looks fairly comprehensive.
 
Most people just whip out the old Cd & put the new one in its place. Saves all the problems of worrying about master/slave & power etc. If one really does want the advantage of two drives for say quick copying, then its usaully recommended to fit the Cdrw onto a different ide than the CD so as to overcome an ide bottleneck.Otherwise fit on different ide than hard drive.One possible setup is HD & oldCd on ide1, new DVD on ide2. ARGUS have a liteonit DVD/CD/RW for €49
 
Ger said:
Saves all the problems of worrying about master/slave & power etc.
Click to expand...
You still need to make sure that the new drive is correctly configured like the old one (e.g. master or slave or cable select).
 
You are quite right Clubman. Indeed it may also be necessary if it is decided to fit an additional CD or DVD device to go into 'setup' or CMOS settings and adjust BIOS configuration. Its also possible that the ribbon cables wont fit or be long enough to go from HD bay to CD bay if configured as I suggested (as was my case a number of years ago)to get max performance. Also if mistakes are made the computer will not boot.
 
aircobra19 said:
Why would you need 2?

If it was me I'd replace whats there with a DVDRW drive.
Click to expand...

Ok - should have been more specific - what I need is the capacity to copy or create CDs. At present, have just one player (not RW).

I'll probably look at this over the w/end

Thanks all.
 
You only need one CDRW drive to copy CD's not two. Might be slightly quicker with two but how critical is speed? Ditto a DVDRW. Still makes more sense to buy a DVDRW as they are relatively cheap now.

[broken link removed]

vs

[broken link removed]
 
Caveat said:
Ok - should have been more specific - what I need is the capacity to copy or create CDs. At present, have just one player (not RW).

I'll probably look at this over the w/end

Thanks all.
Click to expand...

it is relatively easy to fit there may be an artical on the web try pcadvisor.co.uk and search their site you could then print out the info to have it handy while installing also a dvd drive would be better than a cg
d drive liteon do a good 20 speed drive
 
Oops

Apologies - I actually do have a DVDRWdrive...

It isn't obvious by the description on the actual tray - It just says DVD.

But when I checked properties etc it is a DVDRW.

Sorry for wasting everyone's time & thanks anyway - as I said this PC was only recently given to me and I hadn't really explored it properly I suppose.
 
Just checking.

You'd be in a very bad way if you didn't have 650mb left on a HD for a CDROM copy. Windows also needs space for a decent swap file.
 
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