Why do I now have a BD Rom drive on Windows 8.1?

Topic

New Reply

My older computer (a Dell XPS 8500) I refused to upgrade to 8.1 years ago so it has been on 8.0 all these years. Still running strong so I decided to update to 8.1. It’s OK….but I was right to NOT upgrade until now as 8.0 is better IMO but my original intent was to upgrade to Windows 10. Then I learned I had to install 8.1 first and even then it looks like a hassle to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro.

Anyhow, I see I now have a BD ROM drive…never heard of that! Where did my CD ROM drive go? Opening this “new” BD ROM drive activates the CD ROM tray. So, will I be able to use it as a CD ROM drive? I have tons of CD disks for this older computer.

Reply | Quote

Replies

Mele20 wrote:

So, will I be able to use it as a CD ROM drive?

Yes, Blu-ray optical drives can also recognise CD (and DVD) disks.

To find the make and model of the optical drive, use Device Manager or something like HWiNFO Portable (or Piriform’s free version of Speccy).

Using HWiNFO, expand the Drives section in the left-hand navigation pane, select the optical drive then look for the Drive Model entry in the right-hand information pane.

Hope this helps…

(Note that since CCleaner took over Piriform it has removed the portable version of Speccy from its download builds and added several pages to the actual download link for the free version, all to try to make you buy the Pro version. If you want to avoid this, either use this direct download link to the free version or Google ‘speccy portable’. I no longer recommend Speccy as my first choice of hardware analyser as a result of the changes.)

1 user thanked author for this post.

Mele20

Reply | Quote