My wife's DVD CD-RW has had a problem for a while now and I have finally caved into demands to fix it (hey, I'm a computer guy, I can solve any computer problem - NOT). My wife has a Dell Inspiron 5100 and it plays DVDs fine but for some reason it refuses to even acknowledge a CD when placed inside the drive. Sounds like a hardware problem to me, but then I'm a software guy so I would say that ;-)
Looks like I could be buying a new drive. I think I may go for an external one this time maybe upgrade to a DVD writer. My wife doesn't work so she plays a lot of games/watches a lot of movies/listens to a lot of music so its really pretty essential for her to have a CD writer, especially as she only has a 30 gig harddisk that spends most of its time running out of space :(
Anyway Stuart Parr suggested I post a question at Note Book Forums, which I have done. Let's see if these guys can throw any light on the situation.