Two part Blue-Ray drive question  

the 7800 does not support HDCP.

No Video, Not compatible from what I understand.

It may play regular DVDs but then why would you bother

it will not play any HDCP content meaning no BR movies at all. It will be worthless except to watch DVD's or record data on a BR disc.

as for buying it from Dell, I've tried asking for the part number and no luck... i think i just need to get someone who speaks better english on the other end of the line...

Sorry to steal the thread but does the 7900 gtx support BR. Or is it only the 7950.

The 7950GTX is the only video card Dell offers in a laptop that supports High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection. Depending on your player it'll either downscale the BR or HD-DVD movie OR it won't display the movie at all. Mind you you have to have an HDCP video card AND monitor. As of right now, there's real no point in putting BD or HD in a Laptop. Wait until the price drops or when one format shows a clear advantage over the other.

..That player is for the XBOX 360. I doubt they are going to market it to play with a non-HDCP compliant device...Here come the hacking sites...


As far as the 7900GTX, I know the initial release of the 7900 desktop series did NOT support HDCP. They later started to offer it, but I am not sure if it was offered on the laptop GO 7900 GTX

That may be true (that it's for the 360), but there are about 100,000 people who got it to work with a PC (it's plug and play with Vista) and a HD-compatible version of WinDVD, myself included. Check out this site: http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2006/11/8303/ - and keep in mind they only opened the drive for grins, you don't actually need to do that.

...of course I'm sure that they have seen what people are doing M$ will take further steps to squash that until the next hack.

...Hmmm...So much for this being a thread about laptops.

M$ fully supports it's own 360 HD-DVD Drive working with Vista... plug and play baby!!! I have both the Dell BD Drive and the XBox 360 HD-DVD drive happily working on my 1710 with Vista Ultimate and Cyberlink DVD (new version works with BD & HD-DVD). On topic... www.slysoft.com AnyDVD HD will help with the non HDCP issue. It also addresses MANY other things... awesome program IMO

...While I am sure the drive is plug play I am also sure M$ did not intend for people to take the Xbox drives & plug them into a computer instead of the Xbox.

well...I would imagine that drive is not made exclusively for the Xbox.. It is likely the internal components are the same as the ones used in other drives. Of course I'm only saying that because it makes sense

Your argument is running out of steam here. We get it, you think M$$$oft is a giant $$ evil $$ corporation bent on destroying the world, and any action they take is by definition against the interests of consumers and it's customers. The fact that your sig alone shows you own two Microsoft powered machines and probably use some variant of their software 100 times a day is of little matter - their monopoly forced you to do it, right? We get it.

That said:

Of course it's a generic HD drive in there. Microsoft doesn't manufacturer those components, only a handful of companies do.

I am quite sure it occurred to more than one manager over there in Bellevue, Washington that hey, somebody might - gasp - take this external drive, with it's standard USB cable, and get this - hook it up to a PC. And furthermore, since it's a standard ATAPI compliant HDDVD drive, there are drivers that will work for it - in fact built in to Vista. I am pretty positive that thought crossed more than one mind. They may not go out of their way to advertise it, or put XP drivers on the front page of Microsoft.com, but that is due more to support considerations than anything else - if some hobbyist hooks up the drive they could care less but if they officially support it on the PC they are in for a million phone calls when someone can't get Batman Begins (or whatever) to work on their non-HDCP compliant monitor.

That's a long way from what you are claiming.

And this is about laptops, is this topic not about hooking up a 360 drive to a Dell laptop?

..I don't need steam, I have logic. Where you get the idea that I believe M$ is an evil empire is beyond me, I have 5 Intel powered machines with tons of M$ software & M$ compatible software... If you read my statement you are stating exactly what I did, then you added "of course" as a sarcastic little tag. I'm not saying that everyone didn't know. I'm sure there were people out there that asked if somone could open it up & use it on a PC. that said I'm sure they also examined the cost to make it more difficult & decided it was not financially feasable to add additional protection that some consumers would manage to bypass anyways. In answer to your last question- The original topic question was "will the Blu-ray drive work in my M170..."The answer was a simple no. the M170 had a Go 7800 Card, which was not HDCP compliant. If you decide to subvert those protections that is your choice but I was not there to provide ways to bypass HDCP.

Sorry if I misunderstood you but I tend to roll my eyes at anyone who substitutes a $ for a letter in Microsoft or otherwise shortcuts it. It's such a 15-year-old-in-love-with-Linux-for-the-first-time thing to do, whether that's the case or not, you know?

Are you apologizing or substituting insults? Implying the above since I use "M$" instead of MS is questionable in itself. I would prefer you keep your assumptions to yourself (we all know what happens when you assume something). M$ as I lke to put it is a quasi-monopoly that provides me with every software title I could ever want, as well as an OS that allows other software creators to provide me with hours of entertainment. They make an insane amount of money & I have always figured they should have used M$ as their corp logo to flant how sucessful they were. So in closing it would be nice if you could try to avoid the sarcasm & trying to insult me because you apparently have nothing better to do.