One of the things I didn't pay much attention to, when I was shopping a replacement for \\wraith, was the optical drive capabilities. Previously I had spent the extra for DVD-RAM capability, because once upon a time it seemed feasible to keep full backups on DVD-RAM. But over the years, with software libraries and client digital media authoring, a 4.7GB data DVD capacity became, shall we say, cramped.

I assumed and rightly so that any recent, well-reviewed, off-lease machine's optical drive would write at least single-layer DVD-+/-R media. But with a DVD+R disc in the tray, Win7's Explorer "burn" command did nothing. Selecting the drive and drag-and-drop just warned me something about the disc in drive D: could not be read, maybe it needed formatting... but nowhere in menu options did I see an option to format and that's not even an appropriate operation for write-once media. So I downloaded Nero InfoTool, which indicates \\ghost's "DVD+/-RW DL Recorder" (HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-U20N ATA device) handles reading and writing to just about any DVD media: +/-R, +RW, -RAM, +/-R DL. (And of course reading, but obviously not writing, to DVD-ROM lol)

After some googling, I got the impression that Win7 (and perhaps earlier windowses) relies on the Shell Hardware Detection service to enable optical media writing. On XP, there was an annoying tendency for that service to run autoplay willy-nilly regardless of what else you did to prevent it, so for security's sake I kept the Shell Hardware Detection service disabled. If they haven't sorted all that out by Win7, though, then there's no hope for the human race anyway, so we'll give it a whirl.