Greg et al, We have had constant problems with clients and their CDs. It has been a technology under development. Andrew's rules of thumb are: 1. Don't install InCD, or if you must don't have it start with the operating system. It causes constant hassles because people can't remember how to get the things out, or are too impatient and don't wait for it to mount or de-mount. I suspect it's buggy too. 2. Use rewriteables with normal CD burning software... you don't have drag and drop, but it's dependable burning 3. Always test your CD in another drive before leaving. 4. Make sure XP's native CD burning is turned off... it interferes with other stuff. 5. Always finishe the CD if you are taking it elsewhere, or if it is important material or you may not be able to read it. 6. Don't buy cut price media. It WILL let you down. 7. The earlier the CD burner and the earlier the software, the more important these rules are! If you don't have something made in the last 18 months, buy a new burner... they're cheap for CD's; they're really fast, and the day of duds is over.. Even dual layer DVD's cost me under 200 to buy and we don't attract any discount, being a software developer, not a volume retailer. FWIW, if you are buying a dual layer DVD burner for more than $230.00, or a CD burner for more than about $85 (from memory) you are being well ripped off! You should easily do better than this for LG or LiteOn. Dual layer media (9 Gig rougly) was hard or impossible to get last time I tried. Blue ray will be here in a year or two will be affordable for us ordinary mortals in probably a year or so after that (27 Gigabytes per "CD") Andrew
-----Original Message----- From: Greg Crawford [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, 18 August 2004 10:49 PM To: insights-l Subject: A Computer Question: CD-R/RWs, DVDs, etc I am wondering whether our computer gurus can tell me if there is currently a degree of chaos ruling in the field of CDs and DVDs. On my old computer with a CD-RW/R drive, I used Easy CD Creator 4. It was possible to either use the software to add files to the CD, (in which case it could be read by all CD ROM drives), or use the UDF packet writer to format the CD and use it like a floppy (but only those computers with UDF readers could read it). I bought a new computer last year with a CD-R/RW & DVD reader. It came with Nero Express and InCD software. I also have Win XP Pro OS. Formatting the CD-RWs using InCD results in them becoming unusable. The only way to add or delete files is using the Nero Express application. I have started to suspect the software is a dog, but ... I am also having problems with a DVD player. It started to hang. While waiting to get it fixed, someone loaned me theirs with the warning that it too occasionally plays up. They were right! AND a software company I know which recently released thousands of 3 CD copies of their updated software has had great trouble with unreadable CDs all around the world. So I am trying to figure out if all these things are connected. Are CD/DVDs falling over because of too many "standards" or are these things just unconnected events? Greg ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
