Coasters make good Frisbees
Written: Aug 04 '00 (Updated Aug 04 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: It worked 4 times
Cons: Didn't work 60 times
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| molydeus's Full Review: Philips PC Internal CDRW 400 Series |
I bought this about a year ago in the hopes of being able to make backups of my playstation games. I don't konw much about computer hardware, but I didn't have much trouble installing it. Hardest part was trying to get all the wires back inside the case.
So what exactly is a CDRW?
CDRW stands for Compact Disc Re-Writable, but what does that mean? Well basically it means instead of having to use a 2mb floppy to save files you can use a 650mb CD. It takes longer to write to a cd, but it save a lot of work if you have large files you want to backup. Each CDRW will have a set of three numbers, for example it might be 4x4x24. The first number is the speed it can write at, the second number is the speed it can re-write at, the third number is the speed it can read at. You can use a CDRW as a normal cd-rom if you so wish.
A normal blank CD can only be written on once, and costs about $1 if you buy in bulk. A re-writable cd costs more but can supposedly be written on thousands of times. Couple a re-writable cd with the Direct CD program and you've got a pretty good way to save files from programs such as Word or Excel. There is a problem with this, however. Most older CDROMs will not be able to read a CDRW disc. You have to be careful with this when sharing files with your friends. Also old CD players won't be able to read a CDRW either.
The Philips I got came with Adaptec Easy CD Creator. This is one of the more popular programs used to burn cds. It also comes with Direct CD. This is a program that makes your CDRW act like a floppy drive. That means you can save files to it just like you would to a disc, that is of course only if you have a working CDRW.
Now that we know something about CDRWs we can better judge the Philips series.
Let's start with something simple. Let's say you've just scanned in your Rocky Mountain vacation trip pictures and want to send them to Aunt Jane. However, Aunt Jane has a puny old 28.8 internet connection and it would take her quite some time to download your 100+ pictures. So you pull out a blank cd and stick it in your Philips CDRW. You pull up Adaptec Easy CD Creator program. You pick for it to record all your pictures onto the cd and hit record. After it gets done you'll see one of two errors every single time. The most common error you'll get is that the cd did not close correctly. To correct this you must put the cd back into the drive and go to the cd creator wizard, pick data cd. It will tell you there's an error on your cd and ask if you want to fix it, you do. It'll take about a minute and then you'll be good to go. If you didn't get this error then you got a creation process error of some kind. Philips CDRWs hate to write multiple files, I've found anything over 100 and you'll normally get an error. There is no way to fix this, the writer simply stops at say picture number 59 and will not write anymore.
You now call this CD a "coaster" this a term that Philips 400 series cd recorder owners are quite familiar with. A coaster is simply any cd which has had an error during creation and is now worthless for everything, except being used as a coaster for your drink or a frisbee.
Ok, so maybe Aunt Jane isn't going to get those pictures after all, but you can send her a music cd instead. You come up with a nice mix of mp3s for her, change them to a more cd player friendly .wav format and now you're ready to burn another cd! You open up the old adapect program again and tell it to record the songs. After about 30 minutes you'll get a cd creation error. Yep, you're cd didn't close correctly again. So you fix it then listen to it to see how it sounds.
After having listened to it you notice that it did not record three of the tracks and another two of them have skips. This happens quite frequently. I have never burned a cd without a skip in it, and I have an athlon 850 with 256ram.
Ok so you can't make data or song cds, but maybe you can just backup all those mp3 files on a cd so they don't eat up your hard drive. So you tell it to record, and soon you'll find that you can't because adapect doesn't support mp3s. So you go download another program to record them, and your good old Philips decides to stop on number 78, because it doesn't like to record more than 50 files.
Well maybe you can do that but surely you can back up those playstation games you bought the CDRW for in the first place. But then again maybe not. I bought a bulk of 50 cds and then I tried to copy some games. Out of 50 blank cds I had 2 succesful burns and 48 coasters. I figred maybe Adaptec wasn't any good so I tried CDRWIN with some high dollar Maxell CDs. No better, 10 pack resulted in 10 coasters.
I've tried countless combinations of cds and cd writing programs and none of them work consistantly. I've tried burning from my hard drive, and burning from my cd-rom to CDRW. That worked 1 out of 8 times. But the cd it worked on had many skips in it, all the others wouldn't play at all, in cd-rom, CDRW, cd player, or in cd player in car.
If you're looking for a way to get some expensive coasters for your parties this is the CDRW series for you. The coasters also work well for playing frisbee, and if you throw them against a wall hard enough they shatter into a thousand pieces. If you're looking to actually burn CDs I would not buy this.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
molydeus
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Member: Matt Lupton
Location: Toledo, OH
Reviews written: 55
Trusted by: 20 members
About Me:
Uhh.. me like play games.
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