Right I've actually bought an xbox and was lucky enough to get one with a samsung drive- now my bro wants one but also wants to play divx movies of cdr- so i've been contacting many of the modchippers and nearly all of them have the same reply- out of stock of samsung's and none of the newer models seem to have samsung drives- nearly all philips- dunno why- and this is by no means definitve

anyway one mod chipper (on ebay) got back to me saying that it didn't matter seeing as he could "tweak" the thompson or philips drives to read cd-r media.

My question is would messing around with the potentiometer (which is the tweaking i assume he's reffering to) affect the life of the laser? I mean he has a 90 day guaruntee on it but still

p.s. samsung drives themselves are being traded for like £90-100 on ebay!!

i suppose its possible, maybe, but you are going to greatly shorten the life of the drive by doing it. just use dvdr, or cdrw, and dont mess around tweaking the drive.