Repair Your Apex!

[sommersby]

I have an apex 660 that I have had for a couple of years, after about a year it started to have trouble with mp3's, then vcd's then svcd's finally where it would not play them at all, dvd's played fine, after doing some research on-line I found that the cheap 2x raite player they use in these have a tendancy to fail. I purchased another dvd drive on ebay, a raite 108h 8x for $30, Popped it into the 660, apex uses standard dvdrom drives, the bay door even fit the new drive, had to change the mounting slightly and snd the door face a little to allow it to retract slightly more. Other than that it woks great, all functions work Great and it boots much faster, one look at the old drive compared to the new will tell you you are putting in a much better model drive. Hope this helps someone!!

[homerpez]

Well.... I've already tried such, and it is very true... the Apex does have a crappy drive, and it does accept (probably any) IDE DVD-Rom unit as a replacement. Actually, the older and slower it is, model-wise, the greater chance it will work (I'd say 8x and under).

The problem I saw, was the mounting. It takes a bit of planning to get it just the right place for the door to open (this is on my Apex 500W unit), but that's the only drawback. But enough of a drawback that I don't want to attempt it until the Apex drive goes bad completely. I'm lazy.

For owners of these Apex's (600 and 500), I would dare say PLAN ON A DRIVE REPLACEMENT! I've already had one go bad (solely a drive problem), and replaced with another whole player. So far the replacewment player works, but for how long?...

They are awful drives... flimsy, and ever wonder why whe you play some discs you get distortion lines on the screen?... (The drive isn't shielded!)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: homerpez on 2001-12-12 19:34:11 ]</font>

[sommersby]

I thought about trying a different model dvdrom, but my research never found anyone attempting it, and I wasn't sure how tolerent the built in drivers are. So I stuck with a raite, Raite makes good drives also, and the 108h is/ or was, a pretty well reviewed drive. Ad from the people who have replaced with this model, none has ever had a problem again. as for mounting, use the original standoffs, use hot glue to fasten them down, then a thin spacer, I used a piece of cassette jewel case, and a little more hot glue to fasten the drive down, hot glue works well because it holds firm, dries fast and your can still pop the unit off pretty easy if you need to. I had to cut about an 1/4 of an inch off the bottom rear edge of the loading cover, you cannot see this unless you remove the door, when closed the door sits about 1/8 inch inside of being flush, no big deal and still looks nice.

[sommersby]

One other thing, the drive I removed had no jumper, I first tried the new drive without the jumper and the apex could not find it, installed the jumper in the master position and it worked fine.

[P@iNKilleR]

I've got an old alba DVD 103 made by shinco... as U R all on this subject I was wondering if u can replace the dvd drive in that aswell as it only plays dvd's now & nothing else... any help!

Kev!

[insane_asylum13]

Can u just remove the original circut boards and stuff, and hook up a new dvd drive, in your own custom case? I could make one out of wood and/or sheet metal? Is it possible?

[sommersby]

I am only familure with what I researched about APEX, if another brand player use to play vcd's and then stoped like mine did, well, I guess you could try another drive and see, I would try and find out what brand of drive it uses and stick to that. as far as building your own, I don't see why not, in the apex their are three circuit boards and the drive, you could probubly even tranfer it all to any old computer case, even a nice small one with a single 5 1/4 drive bay, no modes to the apex door that way, but really, mounting the new drive was very easy, maybe a total of an hour for the whole job, and if I knew then what I do now, it would of taken half that.