Recently i have found that none of my cds have been playing in my computer. the startup screen will not appear or the cd does not work after a while. also,on my computer, where it normally shows the hard disk drives, the cd drive wont appear. i think i cant play cds because of this but i dont know how to install it. if it helps, i use windows vista home premium. please help!

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11­CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} Apparently it seems that this is an age old fix for even XP systems. If you venture to the registry key above by doing the following steps: 1. Click on the start menu. 2. If this is a Vista machine in the search box type in “regedit” without the quotation marks. 3. Maximize the HKLM and then go ahead and browse until you reach the key listed above. 4. In the right panel you’ll see something along the lines of “UpperFilter” and “LowerFilter” you want to click on each “filter” key and hit delete. Click yes when it asks to confirm if you wish to delete the key. 5. Restart Windows. 6. Let me know if this works. In the case that you’ve deleted both the upper and lower filters and also removed the device through device manager and you still are unable to read CDs or DVDs, this may indicate that your drive is bad and or your motherboard is bad. If your computer is relatively new, I would think that it is a drive problem. If your computer is relatively old, then I would think it may be a bad motherboard. A good way to check if your drive is still good is to “boot” from it. What I mean by this is to restart your computer, find your boot menu and tell it to boot from CD. You will need a bootable CD. I often use a Windows installation disk. Or if you have something like Memtest or the Hitachi Drive Fitness test you can use those. http://www.pcfixreview.com