nikknaks

Hey. Im very very new to this site. Im turning to the internet in the hopes ill find someone who knows their stuff. Basically, i bought a second hand laptop about a year back and it said that it had a dvd drive. I assumed this ment it would simpy play dvds straight off. However when i put the dvd in the drive i was told that i didnt hav the right dvd codec / decoder. So i surfed the net and found a simple ra-tag codec and installed it. Then after dvds would (occasionally) play. However recently its stopped working. So ... exhusted with the constantly temperamental codec - i thought why not simply copy say ... a PowerDvd exe. file from another computer???? Surely then i could just copy it to my desktop and install it and then... Viola! - fully working dvd drive.... but again i was wrong. I cant seem to open the exec. file - and i have no idea how i would go about placing all the files inside the 'Cyberlink' folder (which i copied from the 'Program files' of my sisters computer) to mine. I am a comeplete and utter novice and have no experiance with 'creating batch files' or 'cutting .iss files' - as I have NOT THE FAINTEST IDEA what these things mean. So someone out there please help??? Give me a step by step set of instructions on how to manually install powerdvd using the information/files inside the the Poweredvd folder inside Program files. ....Or perhaps provide me with a FREE program that will allow me to play all my dvds once and for all - that doesnt comepletly screw up my lapotop for once!!!!