We traded a socket "A" desktop for a Dell Inspiron 2650 Laptop a few weeks ago.
It had a problem, when booting, most time the message "Operating System not Found" would appear at the top of the screen.
The Laptop is only 3yrs old and very clean, I did not suspect any serious problems so I traded even with the fellow. He was happy and I am happy too.
I replaced the hard drive cage,adapter, and the drive itself. This fixed all these problems. I also added a 256mb stick of PC2100 memory.
After a lot of research and discussions with the Dell tech's as well as some other techs. I see that Dell is not prone to be truthful about thier systems. I was told that the laptop we owned would "NOT" support a DVDrw Burner. No explanation as to why. The processor is a P4 M 1.7 and is powerful enough to support a burner.
I ordered a generic Pioneer DVR-16K DL Burner for less than $90 delivered. This burner arived this morning and after a very simple install. The install of EMC 7.5, all is super. I burned a full DVD disk of photo's with a average burn speed of 8X. I burned files to a CDr disk, with an average speed of 10X. Perfect burns not a problem one.
After research of the drives, the NEC 6650 DL was the fastest burner, but seems most everyone is sold out at this time. Since I use a Pioneer DVR-108 in my desktop, I settled on the Pioneer drive for the laptop.
Seems as though the CDr drive, CDRW drive, DVDr, DVDrw all are of a generic design, they will fit most any major laptop you might have and work great. So you do not have to pay $300 for a DVR burner from the mfg of your laptop.