DVD drive stopped working on Gateway laptop...it wasn't hardware!

A friend of mine gave me his Gateway laptop to fix because the CD/DVD drive had stopped working. Naturally I assumed it was a bad drive, but I checked it out first by inserting a disk, which did not autorun. Then I realized, as I tried to navigate to the drive in Explorer, that it wasn't even present on the system.

A trip into the Device Manager showed that the device had a caution mark on it. I deinstalled the drive, rebooted, and reinstalled the drive, but it still was no good.

Yep, must be a bad drive right? It isn't even recognized by the system! But then I found this Microsoft document, which talked about removing the UpperFilter and LowerFilter for the drive in the registry.

I did that, and poof, the drive magically started working again. I wish I could remember the entire model number of the drive, but all I can seem to recall is that it was some variant of a TSSTcorp CD/DVD TS drive. I also don't know the model of the Gateway laptop...but it did have a 1.7Mhz processor, 1Gb of memory, and ran Vista so slow that I thought I would pull my hair out waiting on that thing to do any mundane task!!!

I hate Vista and have been using Windows 7 since it was released in January. I have 2 official copies pre-ordered from newegg for the Oct 22 release.

My son's 1986 Merkur XR4Ti is for sale

Well, the time has come, after 23 years in the family, for our 1986 Merkur XR4Ti to leave the family. My dad bought the car new in '86, after some positive reviews and much prodding by ...ME... He enjoyed it for several years, and then it started having some issues, not the least of which was a leaking steering rack, so he parked it and only drove it around the yard a bit to excercise it. In about 2005, my son saw it in the garage and decided he had to have it, so my dad sold it to him for about $1000 after getting the rack and the rear brake cylinders replaced. If that's where the saga ended, it wouldn't be quite as interesting, would it? Didn't think so. We've had numerous issues with the car (which I won't detail here), and it just isn't a reliable, every day driver type of car. So, we are going to sell it. I think, given the amount of work that we've put into it, we should be able to get $1000, but that remains to be seen in these tough times. It has just under 110,000 miles, and lots of new parts, including tires. There is ZERO rust, but the original paint it fading. If someone knows how to work on these cars, this one is a great project car, because it does run, but could use some fine-tuning to get it in good enough shape to be that reliable, every day driver that we hoped it would be.

I'll probably list it in the Merkur Club forums.