Shame on Me
Written: Mar 16 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Nominally useful.
Cons: Horrible software. Flaky hardware.
The Bottom Line: It'll burn CDs...eventually...after a lot of false starts....if you install your own software.
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| optionexplicit's Full Review: Sony Spressa CD-RW (4X/2X/24X) |
Fool me once, the old saying goes, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Sony fooled me twice.
Back at the beginning of my long and illustrious career as an ePinions writer, I wrote a piece about the Sony SPressa USB external CD read-write drive. My conclusion was that, while it was not a great piece of hardware and came with an unworkable, unusable piece of software, that the science of external USB-based CDRW drives was still fairly limited and that was what made the SPressa hard to deal with. It turns out that what really made the SPressa hard to deal with was the fact that Sony makes horrible CD Read-Write drives.
In astrophysics, we learned that gravity is a function of both mass and spin. The Earth sucks us down because it is a big thing spinning very fast. The Sony SPressa external spun at a maximum speed of 8x. My new, internal SPressa runs at 32x. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it sucks about four times as much.
Somehow, I have had the worst luck with CD writers. The first one I ever used, a US$2,000 monstrosity run off of a brand, spanking new Macintosh Quadra that was also the only CD reader in the office went funny after a month of normal use and corrupted six months worth of archived newspapers. The first one that I owned for home ran too hot, upset the delicate heat balance in an already overloaded system, and was eventually instrumental in cooking more than three grand worth of computer over a period of eighteen months. The third was the ill-fated SPressa USB, which I still use. When I was building my new system (an AMD 1-Ghtz, 512 MB RAM, 120 GB Storage monstrosity,) what I really wanted to install was one of the new DVD-RAM/CD-RW hybrids. But, these things are super hot, both in popularity and in heat output. I'm convinced that only four units have been made in total and everyone who didn't get one of the four has signed up for multiple waiting lists to get one. Instead, as my new monster system sat on the workbench, one empty drive bay waiting for some kind of high-capacity writing capability, I finally gave in, wandered over to CompUSA, and picked out a CD-RW drive. As fate would have it, none of the other CD-RWs available that day came from companies that I had even heard of. Sony was, as Willie S. would put it, the demon I knew. And, at this point, I was still blaming the USB interface for all of the problems I'd had with the previous SPressa.
It took me about two days to begin to suspect and two weeks to confirm that, whatever the state of USB CD Writers, Sony has made a fair number of problems for themselves. Functionally, I ran into not only the same problem with this drive as with the USB model, but I also ran into the same metaproblem: The SPressa is so bad that I want to hurl it out my window at drunken four AM revelers, but just useful enough that I don't really want to junk it and eat the cost. So, for those of you who get stuck with an SPressa drive, here is a guide to a relatively peaceful coexistence:
1. Install and then uninstall the software that comes with the drive. Ben Johnson could not have made the leap of logic that was required to package a drive that works on an interface protocol only fully supported on Windows 2000 with software that only ran on Windows 95 and 98. Finding the Windows 2000 version on the Internet is like having the Rosetta Stone wrapped in the Shroud of Turin inside the Ark of the Covenant hand-delivered to you by the Lindburgh Baby as he rolls himself a joint with the Dead Sea Scrolls on his way to see Elvis and Jim Morrisson do a duet of the last movement of Mozart's Unfinished Requiment at a killer party on the Lost Continent of Mu. I've had steak tartare that wasn't so rare. And, once you find it, it doesn't really work. The product, called Discribe (no typo) has never worked for me or for anyone else I ask about it. You need to install it to get the hardware drivers, then install either Adaptec Easy CD Creator or Nero Burning CD ROM. The former is made by another CD-RW manufacturer for use with their drives and the latter comes from a web site entirely in German. But, both are far easier to find, install and use than Discribe--really.
2. Don't ever, ever try to copy from one CD to another. All you'll wind up with is a vast collection of shiny, decorative coasters. If you get one good burn out of eight, you'll only have two more miracles to go before your canonization. Copy or cut an image to a free partition on your system (You do have a free partition, don't you?) then copy the files over from there. Two times out of three, this will work, provided you:
3. Don't use, don't touch, don't breathe on your computer while you're writing a CD. Even your screensaver can trigger a buffer underrun. Keep in mind that I am running a system with 512 megs of RAM and 120 GB of scratch space. It doesn't help. I swear a subway running under my building once ruined a burn.
4. Sacrifice rare Beany Babies to it. I don't have any empirical evidence that this will work, but it gives me a chance to corner the market.
Until I get that hybrid drive, I'll try to put up with the SPressa. But, it is St. Patrick's Day and those revelers are getting pretty loud.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
optionexplicit
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Member: Jekke Bladt
Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 94
Trusted by: 71 members
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