DVD woes

Did you know that you can't watch American DVDs on a UK DVD player?

Neither did we.

Our plan was to just watch movies on our new UK laptop, rather than buy a TV and separate DVD player. Sounded like it could work, and we even bought speakers to hook up to the new computer. Before we left home, we'd chosen about 10 of our favorite movies from our collection to bring with us. We have watched several of them over the past week or two with no problems. Save one. Anytime we would switch between one of our American DVDs and a rented UK DVD the computer would ask us to manually switch the zone setting on our computer so that the DVD drive could read the disk. Okay, a bit annoying, but totally do-able. Just a few mouse clicks and you're up and running. Usually.

Well, last night I went out and bought The Other Boleyn Girl at Tesco, and was excited about watching it over dinner. (Scott and I had been trying to rent it for weeks only to find out that its release date was much later in the UK than it was in the US...I digress...) So we pop it in the player, Windows Media Player pops up and basicly tells us that since we have switched zone settings 5 times (a mere 5 times!!), that we now have an optical drive error. Huh? It further informs us that even if we were to uninstall and reinstall Windows, that it would not fix the problem since it's a hardware, not a software, problem. Meh.

So we call Dell's support line to ask them about it. We go through the first technical support guy who says that it's not a manufacturer defect so it's not covered by our warranty. Would we like to be transfered to the Dell store to purchase a new disk drive? No. No we would not. Scott asked to speak to his supervisor. Mind you, we'd already been round and round with this first guy for a good 15 minutes about how there was no error message saying that changing the zone settings would do permanent damage! So his boss got on the phone and told us the same thing. Only in a more official manner. So we asked to speak to his boss. His boss, guy #3, gets on the phone and tells us that, yeah, what we've done doesn't usually happen very often, so they don't really have a standard way of dealing with it. Okay. What does that mean?

Somehow Scott manages to convince him to send us a new disk drive, free of charge, and walk us through installing it when it arrives. YAY SCOTT!! (See why he's my hero?!) So we promise the guy NOT to switch between watching US and UK DVDs anymore. Oh yeah, but we have to send back the one we have that's stuck on the US zone setting in return for the new one. Ah well. One can't have everything, I suppose.

Our new drive should arrive on Monday. I'm a bit sad that we won't be able to watch any of the disks we brought with us, or have any more of ours sent from home. But I also can't wait to finally watch our new movie! : )