VB Forum / General / January 2010

Ok, I'll try to keep this short and to the point.

Back in 1999 "I" literally built close to 1000 Windows 98 systems
and/or WinNT4 systems. The company that I worked for loved me
because their return rate went down from 50% to less than 1%. No
kidding. They stated their prior return rates were very high and 50%
might be a small exaggeration (then it again it might have actually
been higher). Sometimes I want to exaggerate something to get a
point across, but I don't have to do that here.

(And if anyone would like to know what made me better than the guy I
replaced, it's an easy question to answer. Feel free to ask. It's not a
fault upon the individual, he just didn't know what I knew. :-))

I ran into a batch of CD Writers/DVD Readers made by Creative Labs
that could read most DVDs. However, one specific model made by
Creative Labs (yeah, the Sound Blaster folks who I respected highly
at the time because of all their ISA sound cards), Creative Labs was
venturing into the CD-ROM market and I believe they ended up
buying CD/DVD players made by other companies and then they put
their name on the items (that occured with quite a bit of other electronic
computer hardware, especially those PCI sound cards).

I ended up calling Creative Labs multiple times, talking to multiple
"technicians" (salespeople) at Creative Labs. I knew that DVDs were
growing in size (meaning more and more data was getting put on them).
The "technicians" were really just salespeople trying to sell things and
they did not know what I knew. They were used to talking to other
technicians that did not read up on the latest events in DVDs (I ended
up with a subscription to some engineering journal that was oriented to
engineers in the laser field and the articles at that time talked about CD
and DVD formats).

It was the hardware that was faulty and the sales people held no clue
at what was going on in the DVD market. DVDs standards started
off at holding like 1GB of data on disks, then it went up to 2GB,
then another method provided 4GB and I think it peaked out at 8GB.
The numbers are probably not exactly correct, so take it just as a
description to give an idea of how the DVD technology developed.

The DVD format was not the only problem. CD-ROMs were made
to support 600MB, then 700MB, then 750MB, then... and again,
the numbers are probably a little off, but that's the way it went,
smaller and smaller tracks, better electronics, sensors.

Then there were some CD writers (sometimes a whole model line)
that could only read the CDs they created, other CD players were
unable to read the CDs created by those bad "models" or "drives".
Those CDW drives were a major pain to deal with and there were
alot of them out there manufactured under a whole bunch of different
names (most were unknown "no name" cheap drives but some others
carried labels by well-known companies, i.e. Creative Labs).

By the way, I own a Creative DVD player that works great! <g> And
this isn't to bash Creative Labs.

So what I recommend, when buying a new CD/DVD writer, is to do a
serious of read tests (some of the real-long movie DVDs that hold a
long movie are good to see if the player will read the higher formats).
Make sure the DVD player can read your old CDs and DVDs.

Then do a series of write tests, where you write to a DVD or CD and
then test that media in an old Windows 9x system to see if it can read
it, and then test it in another system. Two or three different machines. If
all read well, you've probably got a great drive and have no worries. At
least that's based upon my own personal experience.

If one of the other drives can't read the disk, take the new drive back
as soon as possible and ask for a replacement. It's a pain in the rump
way to do things but that's the only way to do it, as far as I'm concerned.
Testing to make sure that older systems can read and copy from a FULL
data disk is a requirement. Test the audio burn and playback as well.
And for DVDs, the video recording and playback is a must as well.

Trust no one? Trust no one. Test everything.

And one last thing I'll mention, is that burners may write very well at the
lower speed settings and then go to hell when you try to get them to
write at their "fastest" setting. So be prepared to do ALOT of returns
if you're testing things on their "fastest" write settings. I've seen a few
drives that don't work at their fastest settings but work very well at
slower settings. So whatever X they put on the drive may be a lie
and if you're buying cheap drives be prepared to use something lower
than their advertised fastest speed.

It's a good idea to test all purchased readers.

CD writers (and/or DVD writers) end up as a special class of goods that
require ALOT of special attention after they're bought. All disk drives fall
into this special class of goods, but my own personal experience really
indicates that special tests need to get performed to determine if a new
drive really works.