Nate

excelent ! stupid me, I thought the burner was just for burning, not general cd viewing/playing ;( so yeah my drives are packed with image files from my portfolio project Quake 3 pro frag movies on and on... as far as copying music, I'd more likely be making mix cd's to play at work in a regular cd player ( I work in a metal shop, not an office ) so I'd be taking a song or two off a cd, not the whole thing. but it won't matter anyway since I'll have loads of space when I get the existing clog of stuff off the drives. thanks Jason, it's a big help. oh I did buy a MSI CR52-M with NERO 5

Hi all, about 3-4days ago my cd drive started giving me a message that it's "not ready" with options to re try or cancle I've not changed anything on my comp lately that I can think of. I did get a cleaning cd (with the little fuzzy thing on it) and a can of air to blow it out. no luck with that... I admit I'm a smoker and my rig is about 4 yrs old, I haven't had much reason to get inside it over the years. but I did blow out the dust when I put in some memory and another time when I put in a network card a while ago. anyway, my drives are pritty full and I wanted to put in a cd burner but I need the cd drive to get at the drivers on the suplied disk, I did check the mfg website to d/l them but -grrr- they have 2 burners with the same name but one is series 1xxx and the other is series 3xxx and I see no info on the one I bought about it's series >_< what I got is an MSI Optical CR52-M w/ nero 5 my os is NT 4.0 I also bought a used cd drive (tested good) for $2 just in case mine is dead. the burner is also asking for 1 gig of free space for image recording...atm I don't have a free gig on any drive...720+/- mb on C drive...others are full. I'd hate to buy another $80 or so in zip (250) disks to store another gig of stuff that I want to put on cd's... the point of the mission here is to clean and empty my drives onto cheap cd's rather than spend more on the dang zip disks. I'm not the most savy comp user but I have managed to keep my rig running well so far by myself surfing the web for info. I wouldn't really mind haveing the new drive insttalled for me, but I'd rather do it myseld if I can ;( if I must have the 1 gig ( of swap space ?) on C drive...I think I'll need to uninstall an app that I may rather keep.. ;( there are some apps on C that my comp came with that I've never used and I don't really know what I'd do with them. anyway, if anyone can give me some advice it'd be great