I've found rather erratic performance with optical drives in both WinXP and Vista.

1. The settings (Autorun) described above for Vista sometimes seem to get changed mysteriously, and/or often no settings are entered when the OS is set up. There's noting in the setup to tell you that you need to go there, although I've found 11 different methods of telling Vista to "take me to section XXXX in Control Panel" for the same XXXX section, but up to SEVEN different names for XXXX are used in the various places that send you to the same place - which isn't named the same as any of the XXXX names used in the links.

2. There have been several changes to disk standards during the past couple of years and they seem never to be announced except to the people who create them. A couple of the changes that have required BIOS updates can result in breaking the hardware if a program tries to burn to the new version on a drive that still has the old limits in BIOS. No "burner program" ever tells you what version of the standards must be used, which wouldn't matter much because the standards books have all been "out of print" for about then years and you can't get one.

3. Optical drives are so "generic" now that many OEM drives and some "aftermarket" ones often don't even have a manufacturer's name on them, so it's hard to find where to get correct BIOS updates if/when needed.

4. Optical drives are incompatible with having cats in the same vicinity, due to the "fuzz" that gets on the lenses. Other kinds of filth can be brushed off with a "cleaner disk" but cat fuzz just embeds around the laser lens and sticks tighter. (I'm not sure that gerbils are any more "optical drive compatible," and thus far I've had little success in establishing a satisfying bonding with pet toads or other "hairless" critters.)

John