Dell Vostro 1500 - DVD-RW Replacement

The DVD drive on my laptop took a dive the other day, so being well out of warranty I decided to replace it myself. Even on the Dell website doing a search for parts for the Vostro 1500 wasn't very fruitful. I'm not really sure why they don't have the appropriate parts for this computer, but there's not much I can do about that. I ended up finding a new drive made for an Inspiron 1520 on Ebay for a reasonable enough price. I have no idea how compatibility works for these things, but I had come across a posting on the Dell forums that indicated the Inspiron and Vostro were virtually the same machine. On that advice, I purchased the drive.

Replacement was really pretty easy. Shut down your comp, remove the mounting screw for the drive on the bottom of the computer, and slide the drive out. Due to a funky configuration, you might have to remove the faceplate from the old drive and use it instead of what comes with your replacement drive. There are a couple plastic snaps that you can work loose with a screwdriver, but attaching the plate to the new drive is as simple as snapping it into place. From that point it's just inserting the new drive into the DVD drive bay and tightening the mounting screw.

Really, that's about it! For a quick test I played a CD and it worked without any hassles whatsoever. I did notice that similar to my old drive, the player vibrates quite loudly while ripping a CD. Seems like there may have been a missing part to control vibration on my laptop? I say this because another programmer friend of mine bought the exact same laptop at the same time I did, and not once did it have issues. I'm not really sure, but at least the thing works again.

Here's the old drive after removal.

Old hunk o' junk

~M