Optical DVD drive quits working and external DVD drive not accessible

have an ASUS G50VT notebook that is 3 weeks old and I am running Vista
Home Premium 64bit for my OS. My ODD was working jsut fine, now I can
not read anything. In Explorer I can see the drive, but it does not read
anything. I have unistalled the drive several times and rebooted, but
did not work, I have also tried to edit the registry, but lower filters
and upper filters are not listed to delete. After reading some other
forums and also talking to Geek Squad they all said that my drive is bad
and needs to be replaced.

With that thought in mind I have an older external NEC dvd burner that
I hooked up to my new computer and the nc does the same thing with this
drive, but when I hook it up to my old notebook (dell inspiron 1150
using XP) it works fine. This leads me to believe that possibly my
problem is with Vista, but I do not know what to do. Can anyone help me
please.

Thank You
Gene


--
gene gayle

There may well be a problem with the notebook optical drive, but it should
be under warranty.
There are probably no Vista 64 drivers for your external DVD drive--is it
unfathomable why medium and low-end notebooks are coming preloaded with
driver challenged Vista 64 when so many peripherals lack adequate Vista 32
drivers (tis a fact Vista fans, that bodes ill for Vista SP3/Win7 and yet
another driver model).
All is not lost.
If you can get your Vista notebook to network-a challenge in itself-- then
allow sharing of the drive when it is plugged into the XP unit, or share the
drive built into the XP unit, if you absolutely have to access an optical
drive with the Vista 64 machine.