On Dec 20, 2005, at 7:17 pm, Paul Biddlecomb wrote: > > A friend of mine has been having trouble burning DVD's lately with her > iMac (swivel-arm). The current drive is a PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-104. > ... It looks to me like a burner issue. What models world work in > the iMac with iDVD? And how difficult is it to swap out? The Pioneer DVR-104 is an EIDE optical drive of the standard 5-and-a-bit inch form-factor <http://www.digit-life.com/articles/pioneerdvr104/>, so any cheap optical drive from a PC shop will fit. I was surprised to see that desktop PC drives (as opposed to the smaller laptop CD drives) were squeezed into the iLamps, but I guess they're cheaper - low-end Macs seem very cunningly constructed to use cheap components, and this can make 'em difficult to work on... but not, it seems, in this case. I have August & September 2002 service manuals for the iLamp & the 17" iLamp respectively - let me know by private email which one you need - but it looks like about 8 or 10 torx screws to get it out (4 on the base plate & some more holding the drive in). Any standard desktop PC optical drive will _fit_ the iLamp, then, but not all will be recognised by the iApps. Replacing it with another DVR-104 would obviously be ideal, but although they were popular when they came out (as long ago as 2002?) they're not a current model. I've been very happy with Pioneer 106 & 108 superdrives, but I'm also happy with Patchburn so have no idea their iApp compatibility. As ever the best place to check for iApp compatibility is <http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/>, specifically <http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/search.drivedb.lasso>. I'm not going to go through all the reader reports there, but you should be able to find a drive that'll work. Stroller.