I had to reach down into the three-day-old stuff to retreive this for another equipment question. As I work my way through learning the new operating system and the range of the equipment, and as I install new programs, I am finding a problem with the CD-ROM. I went to the HP site to do some troubleshooting last night. This is an HP Pavilion a820n, lower in the pecking order of new Pavilion computers than my old Pavilion 9870 was when I bought it. I'm figuring out how to keep my functionality relatively high for a while. One drawback on this, and I think it is a defective piece of equipment or a missing driver is the CD-ROM. It's not a burner, just a player, but it only recognizes Audio CDs. I have not been able to get it to even SEE data CDs. If I stick a music CD in, a dialog box (Audio CD F:) comes along and asks about how I want to play or copy the music, or look at the files, but I can't trick it to stay open to let me swap out a data CD. And Windows Explorer can't see anything, it keeps telling me to insert a CD.

The HP site tells me about various things to try. I know it is plugged in because the CD plays music. It has power. It can be seen by part of the system. Is there another driver that should also be working, or is the CD some strange mutant that only recognizes music? Is there such a thing? I need to get this fixed, and I actually am considering having them replace it with a DVD player. Makes more sense, and some of the more expensive Pavilions had a dual DVD system (the new Dell on order has that). I figured I could live with the CD and the DVD arrangement, but since I have to do something about it, I might as well not have to do something twice (the next time being the upgrade to the DVD player anyway sometime down the road).

Any thoughts? I was pretty tired when I read the HP site, but I think by default I've run all of their tests except by starting it in the safe mode.

SRS