I have to really say, I have reset the cd rom screw, and replugged the dvd rom/ cd rom back in before I had sent mine to acer, and that used to do the trick to a point until I got it back from acer with a stripped screw, to which acer assured me it was not their fault so I tried a tap and die as far as I dared, and the screw is still there. I also have come across the usb cd rom option in the bios, then I had a solution for a little while by deleting the top key for the dvd rom in the registry, and then it would work for 2 minutes and stop with multiple times of crashing. The device manager solution is not always reliable, because if your machine does not detect it, it does not exist. The Geek Squad guy that took a look at mine ended up getting kicked out of the house, and I got a refund. I have owned this laptop since June of 07, have enjoyably dropped it 3 times over the course of 2 years after the dvd rom problem, is still a functional laptop, just no dvd rom. Acer is definitely a disposable product. I now have a Toshiba, and am just trying to restore this piece of crap because I want to be able to put linux on it (the only way an acer works).