GRC Wizmo Deals with Idiotic Dell Inspiron 530 DVD Drive Button Placement
The Dell Inspiron 530 desktop PC is, generally speaking, a decent inexpensive quad-core PC. However, it has one glaring design flaw. Take a look at the DVD drive button in the photo above. Now, look what happens to it when the DVD drive tray is extended (open) in the photo below...
Yes, that's right. It is practically impossible to press the button to retract the DVD tray and close the door. Yes, you could push the tray in. But, IMHO, that is a bad idea. Why?
1. You could push it too hard and damage the drive
2. You could push it at an angle and, once again, damage the drive
Fortunately, Steve Gibson of SpinRite and Security Now fame, provides a free utility for Windows that solves this problem (and a couple of other issues too)...
Wizmo is a simple command line utility that does all kind of simple but useful functions on a Windows PC. The two that saves the day here is to open and close CD/DVD drives. You create two shortcuts from the wizmo.exe file. Then alter the properties of each one. The original target for Wizmo is simply:
C:\Users\todd\Downloads\wizmo.exe
...on my system. You might want to copy the file to another location like Programs. But, it works fine from right where I placed the download.
I call one shortcut "wizmo dvd open" and added the word "open" in the target command.
C:\Users\todd\Downloads\wizmo.exe open
The other short cut is "wizmo dvd close" with the word "close" added to the target. These shortcuts can now be clicked from the Start menu or the desktop (depending on where you place the shortcuts) to make opening and closing the poorly designed Dell Inspiron 530's DVD drive simple.
C:\Users\todd\Downloads\wizmo.exe close
Update: The engineers at Dell
Update: The engineers at Dell addressed this by... removing the DVD button altogether from the Inspiron 546. Yes the DVD drive itself has no button. They do include a pinhole however, which can even be made to work half of the time.
Wizmo still fixes the problem. Thank you Steve Gibson!
The problem with mail-order PCs is that you get surprises like this one. It's not like Dell makes detailed spec sheets available.
Well, that is one way to
Well, that is one way to "fix" the problem (re: getting rid of the button entirely). Not a great way to fix it IMHO