I have had enormous trouble with optical drives on my main Windows system. The CD burner that came with it died for unknown reasons. I bought a new DVD burner that did everything except dual layer, and either Ben (my 3 year old) or one of the other small kids who happened to be in the house that day pulled the tray out of the drive. Even though I managed to get the tray back in and physically functional, the drive no longer works.

A couple of days ago, a brand new drive arrived at my house – dual-layer all-format (except DVD-RAM) DVD burning. It burns DVD+R discs (the only kind I have at the moment) at 8X – about ten minutes for a full burn. It claims 11080KB/sec as it burns, which would be equivalent to a 73X CD burner.

Thanks to this new drive, I have a full backup of my main computer now, using three DVDs for a file-based backup and one CD for an MS backup of the “System State” which is a 500 MB file.

I have been trying to locate a utility to lock the tray on my drive so that kids can’t ruin another one, but the ones I have found all cost about $20. Can anyone either help me find a free one or dust off their keyboard and write me one?

I may end up buying one anyway — the cost of buying all these new drives is becoming irritating.