Compaq Presario SR1620NX CD-Rom Not Recognized. Help

Hi All!!
I am a newcomer and I hope that someone could help me.
I have had a Compaq SR1620NX for 4 years. It has been months since I have watched a movie or played a DVD on my computer. When I put a CD-ROM (from a textbook or what have you) in the "top" drive, there is nothing. CD''s? Nope. Burning a cool song to a blank CD? No go. I see a "Window XP" logo when I turn the computer on. Ya'll have to bear with me; I still call music CD's "records." Thanks All!!!

Thanks for the response aford10!
It says "DVD Writer/ CD-writer Combo." When I press the button here, the light is green and the disky- thing pops out. I looked at the writing on the disky-thing and on the left, it says Compact Disk ReWritable" and on the right, it reads " DVDR/RW" and beneath that it says "R DL". The other "beneath" it is the "Expansion Bay." When I press the button here, I can't open it.

I played a CD that was burned by a co-worker! Success!! There is on concern. I placed a CD ROM from a textbook and it did not autorun.: it requires 8MB of free hard-disk space. and 128MB RAM or more. I did as you said and explored the properties of the DVD-RW drive. The used space (blue) was 0 bytes and the free space (purple)was 0 bytes. Capacity: 0 bytes. There was a pie at the bottom that is all blue. Is this the root of my problem?

I double clicked on the drive, a tiny cd appeared for a few seconds, and then the hourglass, and then nothing. There is nothing that appears, no icon. I "explored" it just shows DVD-RW Drive (E. I wanted to download the contents of the CD-Rom to my computer. I played a burned DVD-R and it plays fine. I tryed anothe CD-Rom and I still got nothing.

I tried cleaning and this did not work. First, I really would like to thank you for your time on this crazy matter. On the suggestion of a friend, I went to "Office Depot" (they have computer repairs there, now ) and was told by "The Dude" that my computer is so "eaten up by online viruses, that even Norton could fix it (he acually put Norton in). This is why you can play movies and not CD-ROM software. I can fix it in 1 day for $150. " I also told him about your suggestions, he said no go. The initial look at was free, of course.

There are 2 very good programs that I use to clean my customers, and my personal computers.

Boot into safe mode with networking (f8 on startup). Download malwarebytes (free version) and install. Go to the update tab and update until there are no more updates. Go to the 1st tab and do a full system scan.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Once that is done, restart and get back into normal windows. Download and install Avira. This program will only install in normal windows. Once you have it installed, restart and get back into safe mode with networking. As you did with malwarebytes, do the Avira update, then a full system scan. This will confirm that the system is clean.
http://www.free-av.de/en/trialpay_ [...] virus.html

Restart back into normal windows. Open Avira and make sure it's activated. This is a live update program and will periodically download updates to keep your system protected.