homealone

yup - what he said ^

- providing you get the jumpers right, it is literally a case of swapping the leads over, by far the easiest way, as you avoid messing with the connection to the motherboard, which is, usually, more inaccessible.

there are no drivers to install, it works as a standard IDE device, drivers for which are already there.

If you already have burning software for your cd writer installed, it may be worth thinking about whether it will be compatible with the new drive, or whether to uninstall it & use the software which came with the new one. In general the system doesn't take kindly to having, say, Roxio & Nero both installed at the same time.

- one caveat here is that often CDRW disks won't work with Nero, if they have been formatted by Roxio & need re-formatting, to work (they will read but not write, in my experience).

Your existing DVD playback software should work with the new drive, too, unless that came with a newer, better version, you should be able to keep it.