As a newbie, this forum has been extremely informative and kept me out of trouble, so I thought I should relate my experience installing the drive in the removable bay on an old Dell Inspiron 4100 (Dell’s A12 bios, XP SP2+, 512MB, Hitachi 80GB Travelstar).
- The front of the OEM drive (SAMSUNG CD-RW/DVD) has a curved and removable panel/cover. As far as I can tell, the flat front of the ND drive is not removable. If it can be removed safely, and the curved cover installed I would appreciate someone telling me how!
Anyway, I am kind of like Inspector Clouseau with tools. 
Not wanting to risk breaking the ND drive tray tring to remove and replace the flat panel, I did a little filing/carving on the right side of the drive bay opening and was able to get a fairly nice looking fit.
- Using the OEM version of Nero (v6.3), I was not able write DVDs with the ND version 1.23 firmware. After seeing some posts here referring to conflicts with old Roxio pieces and parts, I used DavidW’s suggestions for cleaning up the registry. See:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=91240&highlight=prassi%2Fveritas
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To be doubly sure, I also used the RoxioZapper mentioned elsewhere in this forum. It is available at
http://www.microadvantage.net/downloads/zapper60.zip -
Thus far, I have only used Verbatum CD and DVD+R media and have had very good results. I am not doing any DL burning at this time, but expect to do so in the near future.
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I am presently running Nero 6.6 and have used NECFLASH to flash the ND 1.23 firmware to Iggy’s 162_orig.bin version. Note and follow all the cautions provided with the downloads and you should be ok.
Many many thanks to all the folks who contribute to this forum! 
Bill