Guidelines for Buying?

Just pick a cheap NEC SATA burner or equivalent and it will be fine. Speeds don't really matter; you don't want the noise of too-fast drives anyway. Some people want a burner with Lightscribe or other labeling technology, i don't really bother. Its alot cheaper without.

cool thanks. only problem is availability. I'll check the local comp stores tomorrow, and if that doesn't work out I'll go ncix.com.

NEC / Lite-On / Samsung, its virtually the same.  

There isn't too much difference in the drives today. However, you want a SATA drive that can get at least 16x on DVD's and 52x on CD's. They make drives that read faster, but the discs don't.

Something like this is good
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Problem with high speeds is that they will only cause high noise when using your DVD. So bad that it was disrupting my gameplay when playing games. The DVD wasn't actually used, but it used the DVD to check for the copy-protection. Result: higher energy consumption and alot of noise that just goes on and on; i'd rather have a silent drive. In fact the more expensive drives are often a little slower; the ultra-cheap drives have the highest "specs" because thats the only reason they are being sold.

Any suggestions for something a little quieter, sub mesa?

Optical drives consume very little power. That shouldn't even be a consideration when choosing a drive. There isn't a big difference in noise levels either. If you get the drive capable of faster speeds, and it seems too noisy for you, you can turn down the speed. It's better to at least leave yourself the option. The cheap drives sell, because a lot of people bargain shop. Some learn from their mistakes, others don't.

Get a quality drive. You don't want to be replacing it within a year.

The local compy store is selling LG 16x (read) burners for $35 with a nice 1 year warrenty... I suppose I'll go with that - now to buy an OS

You could get the free download of windows7 RC. The RC is scheduled to expire on 3-10-2010, but it's free until then.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.asp...

Are the RC codes still working? I heard somewhere both the beta and RC codes have stopped working...

Yes, the RC for Win7 is quite stable and reliable. It a nice OS. I like the LG burners. As previously mentioned you should avoid lightscribe, it also makes drives noisy. My wife has one that sounds like a jet preparing for takeoff!

Turn down the speed? How does that work? From my experience, when reading from a drive, like when streaming a video off cd/dvd or performing software/game installation, the drive decides for itself how fast it will spin up. My current NEC drive is reasonably silent, i can hear it "ramping up" the speed if its read from alot, but it doesn't start at max speed right away.

The cheap drives i were referring to, were DVD-ROM drives, so not burners. My experience with some cheap models was they ramped up the speed to quickly, or even continuously. So watching a DVD gets tiresome because of the huge noise a spinning disc at x16 DVD speed produces. But i don't know many models or even if this is still an issue with what is on the market today. Just wanted to share my own experiences, as i found DVD drives fast enough with the read speeds becoming less of a concern than the noise production, and they are related ofcourse since faster moving parts means more friction and more noise.

Power consumption is a focus issue for me. I built a low-power dualcore PC with 4GB RAM that uses only 33W when idling, possible with a quite common AMD setup and SSD + PicoPSU power supply. In this case, i disliked the optical drive using power continuously so i removed it, and relied on the network where other PCs have DVDs as well. I noticed i needed an optical drive less and less over the past few years, and i actually just needed only one pc on the network to have a DVD drive. Anyway you're right this doesn't apply to the OP.