Following the rapid fall in the price of DVD writers, creating DVD home movies is now a real possibility. With this in mind, your next upgrade will no doubt be the addition of a DVD burner to your PC. Fear not though, as the installation of this piece of kit can be achieved with little of no PC hardware know-how.
Your new DVD burner may be a replacement for an existing CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive. To install your new writer in this slot, simply switch off, remove the cover of your PC (this may invalidate your warranty) and locate the existing drive. Remove the screws fixing the drive to the bay and any cables attached to it. Slide the drive out of the front of the drive bay. (If the DVD writer is to be installed in addition to the existing drive, a bit more preparation is required: one drive must be set as a master, the other as a slave. To set this up, simply change the jumper settings at the back of the drives. These jumper settings will be clearly labelled at the back of your drives and it is merely a matter of placing the plastic "widget" over the corresponding pins.)
The next step is the installation of the new drive. To install in a vacant drive, you'll probably have to remove the protective "blank" from the front of the drive bay. Simply knock this out from the back (you may also need to remove a metal guard from the chassis of your case - simply twist this off). Now slide the drive into the vacant bay. If the drive is a replacement, plug in the cables from you disconnected from the old drive into the new one, one by one, starting with the power cable. This will be a tight fit and will only go in one way. Next is the IDE cable (the wide flat one) - the red line at its edge should be nearest the power cable. If the drive is in addition to an existing one, locate a spare power cable (there should be a few, but you may have to untie a cable tie to make it stretch to the drive) and connect this. Your existing drive will already have an IDE cable, with an additional IDE "plug". To connect the drives in parallel, simply connect this cable as above so that the one IDE cable fits both drives. The other end of the cable should be connected to the "secondary IDE controller".
Finally, screw the drive in using the supplied fixings, replace the cover and boot up your PC. Your drive should be automatically detected by windows. If it isn't close down and reboot. Enter the BIOS settings on reboot (this is normally done by tapping the delete key at boot) and make sure that the secondary IDE channels are set to auto (check your motherboard). You can check to see if the drive has been successfully installed by checking the Device Manager in the Control Panel.
