Installing Drivers

As experts are always going on about updating drivers, I thought I'd trawl the .net and find the latest drivers for my 2 year old kit.
The first problem I found was the bewildering array of alternative specs for my simple AOpen DVD-CD ROM/AMH player. I have no identifying numbers available to me without stripping out the parts. Any tips out there. I've tried Belarc and Sandra but they just say the same as above.
On tackling the CD-RW CRW3248, I had better luck, except that the advice on the download site said NOT to install the driver in Windows but to use DOS.
This is now brain surgery.
How does one do that?