I just tried to burn something for the first time when I encountered a problem: when I place the DVD-R in the drive, windows fails to recognize it as a blank DVD. Sometimes it thinks that the DVD-RW drive is a CD drive (it actually changes the description in "My Computer") that cannot be written to, and other times it says that is an incomapatible storage device. The drive can dectect DVD-R's that have been written to already just fine.

Does this sound like the burner is the source of the problem or Windows is?

The drive isn't going to recognize a blank cd anyway. Have to burn something on it for it to realize something is there.

Is that something unique to DVD-R's? Because whenever I place a blank CD-R in the drive it recognizes it as a blank CD with 700MB of empty space. Also why would windows change the description of the drive from "DVD-RW" to "CD drive"?

Probably CD drive when nothing/cd is in it, and DVD when a DVD is in it. I dunno but it doesn't matter what it recognizes as long as it will burn what you want.

I've noticed windows isn't quite set up to use dvd burners, you have to use another program like nero. it does the same thing on my computer and i can burn just fine using nero and veritas.

UPGRADE THE FIRMWARE.

I had the very same problem about a week ago with my computer. It seems that I had to:

1)Unhook the DVD-R drive when the computer was off
2)Reboot without the drive
3)Reconnect the DVD-R drive
4)Reboot

I never did the reboot in the middle and it kept recognizing the new DVD-R drive as the old CD-R drive.

Also check your jumper settings...