My Experience = Avoid Memorex Drives
Written: Dec 28 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great Price
Cons: Lousy Performance
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| RBradford's Full Review: Memorex CD-ROM drives |
I purchased a Memorex CD-ROM drive shortly after they entered the computer peripherals market. It was a 32X drive, and the price at that time was unbelievable. I think with the rebate offered that I paid something like $20 dollars total. As it turned out, that was about $20 dollars too much.
At first glance, the drive seemed like a good deal. The access time appeared to be respectable, and everything else seemed to be about the same as comparable drives that were priced much higher. I figured that Memorex was willing to offer the low price as a marketing plan, more to get their name known than to make money. Then, when people understood that Memorex makes more than audio tapes, the prices would rise slightly. It seemed like a good plan to me, and if it meant I got a deal in the process, even better.
I installed the drive with no problems. It booted up immediately, just like it was supposed to do, and for a short time it seemed to work fairly well. However, I soon found that my computer was having problems reading many of my CD-ROMS. I would get errors indicating that there was no disc in the drive or that the drive was not ready.
Very quickly this became a major annoyance, as I could never tell if the drive would read a CD-ROM correctly. Many times my games would crash, with the big blue screen saying that certain files could not be found or that the disc was unreadable. I thought at first that there might be a problem with some of my discs, like scratches or something. But then I did a little investigating...
I did a few searches on the Internet for the particular CD-ROM drive that I had purchased, only to find plenty of message boards with people listing the same problems that I had encountered. I checked with Memorex Technical Support, who eventually supplied me with a new driver that was supposed to fix the problem. It didn't.
Finally, I got so frustrated with the drive and its poor performance that I pulled it out and reinstalled my NEC 8X CD-ROM drive. To no real surprise, the 8X performed flawlessly (like it always has). I had upgraded hoping to add a little zip to some of my games with the faster drive, but found that reliability is much more important.
In fact, I still have the 8X drive in my computer and can't find any real reason to upgrade it yet. True, I've built another computer since that one, running a much faster processor and sporting many advanced upgrades (including both a DVD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive), but the other system works great for most of my word processing and business applications. The newer system is mostly for gaming, but with them networked together, I get the best of both worlds. However, one thing is certain, I won't be adding any Memorex drives to either system.
The most disappointing thing was finding out how many other people were having the same performance problems as I was, yet Memorex seemed to care very little about doing anything to correct it. I do have to give them some credit, as they finally agreed to accept the drive back and issued me a return authorization. However, it took a lot of time and nagging to finally get them to agree to take care of the situation.
Although I will never buy another Memorex CD-ROM drive, and probably avoid most other hardware they produce, I do have an awesome power center sitting under my monitor with the Memorex name on it. It's thin and stylish and has worked flawlessly at protecting my computer from power surges. My guess is that Memorex doesn't actually make most of these items, but just private labels products from other manufacturers. I think they probably just made a poor choice on the CD-ROM drives, and I hope they've learned from it. I certainly did.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
RBradford
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Location: Dallas, TX
Reviews written: 109
Trusted by: 32 members
About Me:
I'm a Computer Hardware, Software, and Gadget Junkie.
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