Hello, I have a Toshiba 1555CDS Laptop. It is about 5 years old. It
came with an internal CD Drive but I want to upgrade it to a DVD Drive
so we can show movies, videos, etc. Can you suggest how I can go
about this and what the price ranges would be? I know very little
about the insides of computers. This will be used for our Deaf Cafe so
we can show music videos with captions and short movies. Thank you for
helping us. God bless.

Hi Beanx, 

Upgrading the internal drive on this machine is probably impractical. 
The cost of an internal DVD drive would probably not be too bad but
the labour required to open the machine and replace the existing drive
would be significant.  You would likely have to pay for about 1.5 to 2
hours of labour on top of the cost of the new drive.

Fortunately you should be able to purchase an external DVD drive
fairly easily.  The 1555CDS has USB ports so you should be able to use
any USB DVD drive.  One of these drives will cost well under $100.  A
few examples:

ADI 16x external USB DVD - $59.00
http://store.yahoo.com/gooddealpc-store/adiusb20ex16.html

Another one for $59.75
http://store.yahoo.com/pctekonline/exus16dr.html

Or, if you prefer to purchase from a larger supplier, TigerDirect has
this Plextor external DVD burner (so it can burn DVDs as well as read
them) for $69.99 after $50 rebate:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1005669&CatId=483

I should warn you that though these drives should work on your
notebook you may find that videos are unacceptably choppy.  Your is an
older machine and may not be able to handle the processing
requirements as well as you might hope.  Certainly, if it is still
running with the original 32M of RAM that most of these units shipped
with you'll find the results disappointing.

In the end you might find that it's better to buy a cheap standalone
DVD player to show moves than it is to try upgrading your laptop to do
the job.

Hibiscus

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Request for Answer Clarification by beanx5-ga on 10 Aug 2004 06:52 PDT

Thank you for your response. Makes sense to me. Like I said, we plan
to use the laptop to show music videos, short movies, etc for our Deaf
Cafe. We will be using a projector to show this on a screen so large
group can view it. My next question is... can you hook up the
projector to a stand alone DVD player? This looks like this might be
our best option until we can afford to purchase a new Laptop with
internal DVD player. Thank you again for your time. This helps us a
lot.

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Clarification of Answer by hibiscus-ga on 10 Aug 2004 15:31 PDT

Hi again Beanx, 

Most LCD projectors have the ability to hook up to both computers and
DVD players or other video sources.  There is usually a composite
video in (a single round RCA jack) or an S-Video connector.  You
should look on your projector for inputs labelled with one of those
terms.  If you're still unsure you may want to post another question
listing the exact model of projector you're using and a researcher
should be able to find this out for you.

Hibiscus

Clear answer that helped me move in the right direction. Still need
response for my followup question... thanks