Recently I had a need for a DVD player for my laptop to play a few specific discs however with technology change, of course it did not have a built in optical drive. So I hit up amazon and picked out an external DVD/BD that claimed to be plug and play. But upon using it, there was no software to read discs and it would not work with the VLC software I already was familiar with and had installed. I returned it and went looking again.
I came across this external player that specifically advertised it came with software to read discs as well as to burn them. It was a bonus this Dell external would save me $$. It arrived quickly and sealed. Nearly flawless plug and play but it did require a little Googling during the software installation. I ran into trouble that Windows was blocking the installation requiring Administrator access regardless that I am the admin of my own computer. If you find you run into trouble installing the PowerDVD software that comes with this drive, try the following which was taken from the Microsoft Answers Community Forum:
1. type "command prompt" into the search bar and then RIGHT click it to "Run as Administrator".
2. in the command prompt window type "net user administrator /active:yes" and it should follow with "The command completed successfully" message.
3. from the Start window and your user profile, click it to change to the Administrator profile and wait for it to be set up.
4. locate the setup.exe file for the software and install it.
5. switch back to your original user profile from the Start window.
6. to disable the Admin account access the Command Prompt with Admin rights and type "net user administrator /active:no" which will also be followed by the message "The command completed successfully"
This worked perfectly for me, and the software has had no issues reading the DVDs I placed in the drive. The drive initial disc spin up has a little bit of noise but then the drive quiets back down and is not noticeable during playback. Highly recommend this drive with its included PowerDVD software.
| Standing screen display size | 15.6 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 pixels |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 Pixels |
| Processor | 4.4 GHz core_i5_1235u |
| RAM | DDR4 |
| Hard Drive | 512 GB DVD Drive |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Intel UHD Graphics |
| Chipset Brand | Intel |
| Card Description | Integrated |
| Wireless Type | Bluetooth, 802.11ax |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 2 |
