just out of curiosity. It looks as though i will have to get myself a new cd rom drive in the near future and i was curios to know if i got a dvd rom would that mean that i would be able to burn dvd's with my burner now?

Your burner will be exactly the same as it was before you got the DVDRom. If it couldn't burn DVD's before then it won't after.

What a DVDRom will enable you to do is copy DVD's to your HD which can then be converted to VCD. You can burn VCD's with a CD burner and most DVD players will play them... However you could burn VCD's before you got a DVDRom, so once again no change.

dvd rom plays dvds only
dvd writer -writes dvds and plays them as well