Technology Insights

VGN-TZ180N Laptop: Matshita UJ-850S CD/DVD RW Drive Not Showing Under My Computer Running Windows XP

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An issue I had with a clients laptop after reinstalling Windows XP was the CD/DVD drive was not displaying underneath My Computer. When inserting a CD into the drive you could hear the drive spin up but the drive never displayed underneath Windows XP My Computer window. Initially I thought the issue could be resolved with a file available from the Sony support web site but it did not fix the CD/DVD drive issue. Finally after some research I located a registry edit that did resolve the problem so below I describe how to resolve the issue.

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Sony VGN-TZ180N: Display Not Filling Entire Screen In Windows XP, Resolution Max Is 1024×768

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A client recently had me reinstall Windows XP on their Sony Vaio VGN-TZ180N laptop. There were lots of driver issues after installing Windows XP Professional that were mostly resolved by downloading various drivers from Sony’s support site for the laptop. One that caused me a bunch of problems because I assumed it was related to reinstalling the operating system was the display driver. Once I finally figured out what the issue was it was really easy to resolve but again locating the problem was hard to do. Below I describe the drivers to install and how to resolve the issue of the display only filling about half the width of the laptop screen.