soopafreek

i'm helping a friend with her computer.

she basically has a gateway essential PIII, now running XP Pro. it has a Matshita (Panasonic) DVD-ROM SR-8586 drive that will not play any dvd's.... windows media player gives an error and tells me to change my screen resolution and refresh rate (?!?!?!).

i've gone through the "help and troubleshooting" wizard...

i've checked for windows driver updates...

i've tried uninstalling the drive (via device manager)...

i checked panasonic's site and it states that XP will support the drive natively. but it doesn't.

she says that short of two months after originally purchasing the computer, the drive just crapped out and gave her a generic error and stopped playing dvds.

i tried the k-lite codec pack, but it doesn't work. BSPlayer gives an error when opening a dvd.

it'll show that there is a dvd. i can open the contents and browse the files, but it just doesn't play dvd's. it'll play cd's just fine.

any suggestions? or does it sound like this drive needs to be replaced?

thanks in advance for any help you can offer. :-)

__________________
aaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!!