upgrading cd drive

Hi,
I recently bought an old imac - a 7500 333mhz cpu 384mb mem with a tray loading cd drive running OS 9.22 and OSX 10.3.9 - and I have upgraded the hard drive with an 80gb hdd and while I had the case opened I noticed the cd drive looked just like a laptop drive does anyone know if I could buy a laptop dvd writer and just change it over or does it need to be an apple specific one if possible at all? i looked into getting an apple drive installed but was quoted £139.00 as the Imac only cost me £50.00 in the first place this seems excessive

You are right that this model iMac shared the same CD drive as the powerbooks of the time. However, these iMacs don't have the necessary circuitry to support an internal DVD R or RW drive. You can use an external drive and third-party software like Toast. You'll get low burn speeds because it will be USB 1 not 2. You can a lot of info at www.lowendendmac.com. These are good machines but they are really out of date technically. I bought a 333 iMac new, upgraded everything - RAM, HD, CD-RW and a G4 CPU - and replaced it with a mini about a month ago.