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moasie

3 Posts

13779

October 25th, 2004 04:00

NEC DVD+RW ND-6100A

Hi, I have just purchased a Dell Inspiron 9100. Windows device manager tells me I have an NEC DVD+RW ND-6100A drive. I am unable to verify this through bios/boot up as the Dell "bios" doesn't report device ID. From the forums it appears this is a dual layer recording device, yet I definitely did not pay for a dual layer recorder (as supported by my invoice). During playback of some DVDs (fresh out of the box as well as older ones), the drive makes a loud spin-up sound (a little like the old floppy disk seek operations) at around 5 second intervals. At this stage the playback becomes jumpy and eventually freezes. This is more common towards the end of a DVD than at the beginning, and I have not had this problem with single layer DVDs. This is also happening with the computer running off mains power. Has anyone experienced this problem? Has Dell/windows installed the incorrect device driver? Is this simply a poor quality DVD drive, and whilst my computer is still under warranty should I convince Dell to replace it with an alternative model? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I8600Info

24 Posts

October 25th, 2004 21:00

I have the same drive in an 8600. I do not have the problems you are experiencing - although I do find the 6100A a little noisy.

If you look at the 'fails to eject' posting down the message board you will see that I did, however, have a problem with the drive failing to eject on command. Something to watch out for...

Good luck.:manwink:

 

racerboy777

156 Posts

October 26th, 2004 05:00

I also have that drive in my XPS,  sometimes while reading DVD,s its makes a noise that sounds as if the laser lens is moving back then forth, or seeking (??) but after a few times it works, tonight i brought home two dvd's and it had trouble reading them at first but after a few tries it was fine. i dont really like this drive, but notebook DVD burners are limited, but u cna try an external burner.

scooter421

2 Posts

October 28th, 2004 17:00

Yea, I have an 8600 with the same DVD drive. Sometimes DVD's play fine, but most of the time they skip and jump and it drives me nuts as my computer is only a month old. It does this with brand new DVD's straight out of the box. It doesn't skip like a scratched CD, but something is not right. You can hear the eye (disk reader) moving back and forth and it keeps slamming into one edge of the drive like it's trying to break out of jail. It seems like it slams into the edge closest to the center of the disk and not the outter edge, but I can't be sure. I found it strange when I went to NEC's website to see if they had updated drivers, but I can't even find the 6100 listed anywhere on their site. This problem had been happening sice before I even installed one single new program on my computer so I'm not sure what to do.

Dell, how do you plan to recitfy this situation, I can't go on with what seems to be a faulty DVD drive. Unless you can propose any software updates that will fix the situation I am going to need a new drive. Please get back to me.

moasie

3 Posts

October 29th, 2004 00:00

scooter421, the sounds your drive is making are the same as mine. I've even found that one day it'll play a certain DVD fine and the next day it won't (everything under my control kept the same). This makes troubleshooting the problem difficult. If anyone else is experiencing this problem could they please make a post on this thread. If a lot of people are having trouble with this drive then Dell or NEC might do something about it. My guess is that it is probably just a cheap and nasty drive that probably shouldn't have ever been taken up by Dell.

As far as updates go... I couldn't find any reasonable firmware updates on the NEC or Dell sites, but the Dangerous Brothers have a few firmware updates on their site http://tdb.rpc1.org. The updates sound pretty good: the official one will unlock the faster write speeds that your drive claims to support (but wasn't shipped with), and the unofficial ones can unlock DVD-RW/-R and make the drive "regionless". Perhaps they'll also fix the problems we've been experiencing.

Before doing any of this though, it would be good to get an official view from Dell on this matter. I wouldn't be surprised if even the official update could void your warranty given that it's not on the Dell website. Why is this? We all payed for the advertised 8x drives, yet the functionality doesn't seem to be officially supported.

racerboy777

156 Posts

October 31st, 2004 06:00

Have You yourself tried the dangerous bros. firmware update? i actually found the same site one day white searching on google. but i never tried the update since it is a thrid party thing. jsut wondering if they are any good or not? would they solve our problems about the laser that is rebellious?

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