I was going to make up a title about "Slaves obey[ing] your masters," but thought better of it

I bought my home computer about a year ago, and I made the poor decision of purchasing a remanufactured model rather than paying the extra $60 for a new one. Furthermore, when I started to realize that it was having problems, my procrastination problem kept me from returning it to Fry's within the warranty period. So I was left high and dry.

One of the biggest problems that I had was that the DVD burner never worked. It could read discs, but the computer wouldn't recognize it as a burner. Thus, when I wanted to burn mix CDs for my friends and family last Christmas, I had to plug in the old, slow computer from 1999 and burn CDs with that.

A couple of months ago, it hit me that the solution might be the simplest of all. There's a switch on the back of the burner that determines whether it's the Master unit or the Slave. (Why, I am not sure...I'm not that technical.) When installing the CD burner on the old compy, I remembered that the CD-ROM needed to be set to Master, and the burner to Slave. So I thought that perhaps the burner on the new computer was mistakenly set to Master. I opened the box and took a look - and I was right. So I switched it to Slave, hoping that it would solve the problem.

It didn't.

Now the computer didn't even recognize the drive at all, even for reading discs. And the DVD-ROM drive beneath it was starting to lag and act funny, to the point where I thought it was broken, too. I was just ready to take the darned thing down to Fry's to have them fix it (and I still might, for the other problems it has), when I realized that both drives were set to Slave.

I opened up the box again last night, set the DVD-ROM drive to Master, made sure the burner was set to Slave, and closed it back up again. I turned the computer on, and opened up iTunes (my new favorite player). Tested the DVD-ROM...worked perfectly. The computer recognized the burner and gave it back its drive letter. I dropped a blank disc into it and burned a few audio tracks. Success!

So now I can get back to the business of mixing some new CDs. I'm pretty darned excited about that! And yes, if you give me your mailing address, I'll try to send you a copy. (As long as you don't mind 18 variations of "Rock Me Amadeus".)