90% of the time it should be fine. You want an "IDE" writer (sometimes called PATA) - there are a few SATA ones out there but DONT buy them there for newer motherboards

I got my DVD writer for £22 and just stuck it in my dads pc (mid 2002 - used to have ME) and it worked fine after installing the drivers.

Have you dont it before?

There are things called "jumpers" - yoy can have 2 devices on each cable but the jumpers must be set so one is "master" and one is "slave". NEVER put a dvd/cdrom on the same cable as a HDD it will make it go SLOWWWWWW (and you shouldnt have HDD's as slaves)

Thank you. No I haven't done this before. I was planning on simply replacing the CD burner with the DVD burner - ya know, just plugging the new DVD burner power connector and signal ribbon into the exact places where the CD burner was plugged into. I'm not planning on messing with the jumpers on the drives. Wish me luck. Every bit of advice helps.
thx,
Jason

its easy to do so long as you dont run into jumper problems

DO NOT SCREW ALL THE WAY INTO THE DRIVES SIDES - ONLY SCREW ENOUGH TO HOLD IT STEADY AND LET THE CASE CLOSE, IF YOU GO TOO FAR IT WILL BREAK SOME DRIVES (Most wont, just be aware)

What a hassle this has turned out to be. I installed a DVD burner that I got from Staples on Black Friday and my machine would not recognize it. I moved the jumper around and still had no luck. I should add that this was the I/O Magick 16X DBD L model that Staples was pushing hard. * The box included no instruction manual & no instructions on the box about installing the hardware - just lame no-brainer instructions on how to install the software on the CD which was nothing more than Power DVD and an abridged version of Nero. I stronly suspect Staples was doing this to push their tech service which I found to be ambiguous and inconvient when I asked for specifics. The sales assistants were pushing the tech service on me.
Anyway, after trying for about an hour and a half to get my machine to install the DVD burner, I just returned the thing. My computer is a 2002 Gateway with plenty of RAM and horsepower. I doubt it's the machine. So, I'm just calling my local computer shop to have them install one. The answer to my question was "Yes, this is a headache and a hassle." After going through the headache I'm just going to pay someone to do this for me.
Thx,
Jason