Good cross platform solution
Written: Oct 24 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great MacOS software; Quality hardware
Cons: Noisy fan; awful Windows software
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| adjensen's Full Review: La Cie USB CD-RW |
I bought this because I wanted to burn CDs on both my Macs (iBook and PowerBook G3) and Windows computers (Dell Latitude, some clone running Windows 98). In order to do that, I needed a drive with USB and software for both.
This fit the need, and on the Mac side, I couldn't be happier. I will agree that the fan is a bit noisy, but it's not something that you're using all that much, and if you have to reboot to get it going after you turn it on, that's not a big price to pay for the quiet.
For the Macs, this comes with Adaptec's Toast, one of the finest burning programs that I've used. I had a bit of trouble getting Toast to find the drive at first on the iBook, but that got resolved with a reinstall and a couple of reboots.
Windows, on the other hand, was a nightmare. The Dell (running Windows 2000) will NOT install the drivers for this thing, period. You put in the CD when it asks you to, and it will not find the drivers. I finally manually did that and installed the software "CreateCD" that comes with the drive, and THAT wouldn't run. I monkeyed around with it for a couple of hours before finally giving up.
I got the stuff installed on the clone running '98 (manually, again, the "Plug and Pray" Windows feature refused to acknowledge the driver on the CD) and tried it out. Copying data files goes pretty well, as long as you DO NOT burn above 2x. Audio CDs were about the same, although it appears that the Windows CD burning software is shareware or crippleware, as it came up with some messages about paying more for more features (like changing the space between tracks on an audio CD, something that you can do on the version of Toast for the Mac).
Software aside, this is a pretty solid device, and if your hard drive is running out of space, is a very convenient tool for archiving stuff you don't need as much. It's an "internal" CD-R that's in an "external" enclosure, which looks kind of klunky and has some sharp edges you might want to be careful of if you move it around a lot.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
adjensen
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Member: a.d. jensen
Location: Grand Forks, ND USA
Reviews written: 143
Trusted by: 111 members
About Me:
Now blogging reviews at http://kandsmil.blogspot.com/
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