I have a question about computers.

[The Fat Bioware Nerd]

Is it possible to remove a CD-ROM Drive from an older computer and replace it with a DVD-ROM Drive?

[Garland]

How old is the computer? You need a modest computer to process a DVD. In 1999, I got a bargain bin computer from Staples for 1,000 dollars. It was old enough to still have a 3.5 floppy drive. About 4 years later I got a DVD rom as a christmas present. It installed easy. Was a simple matter of removing the plate and sliding it in, then plugging the wires together at the black clips. That was the easy part. Getting a DVD to play any better than a slideshow was the hard part. Even with all background programs shut off, it was still choppy. If your computer is old enough to not even have a DVD player built in, you might have a hard time getting acceptable performance adding one now.

[Mirage]

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Yes, if your PC already has got a CD drive, replacing it with a DVD drive is no problem at all. You'll have to use a DVD drive with an IDE/PATA interface, because I doubt your PC has got SATA controllers.

Reading data from a DVD drive is no problem at all. New DVD drives are still very slow compared to old hard disks, so the actual data flow from your DVD to the rest of your PC shouldn't be a problem. DVD video playback is a different matter, because that require enough CPU power to decode ~8 Mbit/s MPEG 2 video, but this should still be doable on say a 1 GHz Celeron CPU from the beginning of the millenium.

Also, DVD drives are really cheap, you can get one for £15 if you look in the right places. Even a DVD recorder is in this price range.

[The Fat Bioware Nerd]

How old is the computer? You need a modest computer to process a DVD. In 1999, I got a bargain bin computer from Staples for 1,000 dollars. It was old enough to still have a 3.5 floppy drive. About 4 years later I got a DVD rom as a christmas present. It installed easy. Was a simple matter of removing the plate and sliding it in, then plugging the wires together at the black clips. That was the easy part. Getting a DVD to play any better than a slideshow was the hard part. Even with all background programs shut off, it was still choppy. If your computer is old enough to not even have a DVD player built in, you might have a hard time getting acceptable performance adding one now.

It's a compaq persario I bought back in 2003.

[Flying Mullet]

DVD video playback is a different matter, because that require enough CPU power to decode ~8 Mbit/s MPEG 2 video, but this should still be doable on say a 1 GHz Celeron CPU from the beginning of the millenium.

Just to further verify Mirage's post, my old desktop came with a DVD drive and it runs on a 1 GHz Pentium 3.

[NeoTifa]

Just make sure the DVD drive is compatable. I just did it with my old Compaq Pressario

[crono_logical]

I'm surprised if a 2003 machine isn't capable of playing DVDs, that's not really that old

[Flying Mullet]

True. My old desktop is from early 2001.