Vista - Optical DVD drive quits working and external DVD drive not accessible

have an ASUS G50VT notebook that is 3 weeks old and I am running Vista Home Premium 64bit for my OS. My ODD was working jsut fine, now I can not read anything. In Explorer I can see the drive, but it does not read anything. I have unistalled the drive several times and rebooted, but did not work, I have also tried to edit the registry, but lower filters and upper filters are not listed to delete. After reading some other forums and also talking to Geek Squad they all said that my drive is bad and needs to be replaced.

With that thought in mind I have an older external NEC dvd burner that I hooked up to my new computer and the nc does the same thing with this drive, but when I hook it up to my old notebook (dell inspiron 1150 using XP) it works fine. This leads me to believe that possibly my problem is with Vista, but I do not know what to do. Can anyone help me please.

Thank You
Gene