Cool, I got Debian installed and I am posting this from my laptop. Got wi-fi working. Got a new battery. Got a DVD Drive. I am officially mobile. It was alful getting the display drivers and wi-fi card to work. And I still don't trust the display drivers. I get blank screens. But I sure have learned a lot about finding my way around using only the command line interface. Now to see what this thing will do. It runs a lot better than when it had XP on it. A lot faster. I just may become a Linux convert. Pooh Bear IBM Thinkpad T22 900Mhz processor 512 MB RAM

I just replaced the dead cd-burner drive on one of my computers, I got a lite-on DVD burner drive that does pretty much everything from newegg for like $39. There are good prices out there. I also have an external usb cd-burner that I can connect to any of my computers by usb to have an added cd-burner, I found it on a clearance rack at an electronics store for around $15. If you do not want to dig into the machine to take the old one out and install the new one you may want to get one of the external usb ones. Replacing the internal one is not difficult but does take a bit of knowledge, it is more difficult than say adding memory. Some times the doors can get off the tracks and on occasion they can be taken out and worked on and fixed but that is a big maybe! It is a good idea to never force things! Also if you use the paperclip in the little hole in the front of the drive it is usually advised to have the pc turned off and unplugged to do that, I know not everyone does that but on the directions that come with them it does say that. Guess the risk of something electrical happening is the reason.

Have you tried more than one CD? And more than one type? If for example you are trying a music CD now try inserting you XP operating system CD and see what pops up. Does the activity light on the front of the DVD player come on when you close the drawer with a CD inside and does the speed of the flashing increase after a few seconds of activity?

Sounds like maybe the darker color thing mentioned above may also play into it. My 2001 Grand Cherokee ( factory am/fm/cd/casette player) will not recognize burned CDs. i am currently using my laptop with XP and have tried windows player, I-tunes and BurnerXP but haven't noticed any different results from any of that different software. After going thru about 30 cds burning at different speeds and formats, I finally got it to occasionally recognize one I burnt at around 4X using PCM .wav (uncompressed) format but to recognize and play I usually have to fast forward it thru a couple of songs while it is doing the initial read. Once it recognizes and starts playing then will usually play the whole CD but doesn't always work for whatever reason. I may try the label thing or try to find some of the "dark" cds to see if that matters. We have a 98 KIA witn an aftermarket cd player and it will play just about anything burnt to cd no matter format or speed.