Alot of reviews here so just gonna make some notes on my installation and preformance in windows 2000. The drive itself rocks, its quiet, and I've had no read errors on my cds useing generic buy-by-the-100 cdr's at 12x. The included software on the other hand is a whole nother ball of wax. EZCD4 installed fine but when you run it and your viewing the directory trees for the cd and your hard drives.. it keeps "refreshing" every 3 seconds and getting the root dir information from every drive.....INCLUDING the cdroms, this was makeing my plextor40x go NUTS and slowed down the computer in doing so, so that was un usable. No problem for me though, I use cdrwin and its been flawless (I did need to update it though.. old version didnt recongnise the drive as a valid cdr). direct cd I didnt really give a chance... it "bit it" with the plextor manager. you see, after installing the plex manager in win2k and rebooting.. my cdroms dissapeared. windows said it couldnt load the drivers, but the drives where under controle of the plextor manager, just not seeable by windows and explorer. And when direct cd saw no cdrom drives it freaked and crashed... so both were deleted in one swoop.

I hope to check plex's site soon for updated manager because its ability to slow down the cdrom drive will be usefull for the loud as a jet engine plex40, but out of the box.. it didnt work. if your a new user and have no cdr experince this might be tricky for you, but then if your new to cdr and this is tricky, I doubt your in windows 2k.

Update: Got a later vesion of the PLextor manager, it works, but it is a bit unstable. If i leave it alone for the most part its fine.. but playing with it can cause it to crash, luckly I odnt use it all that much, just to force drive speeds and to get direct wave access to music cdroms. (A little feature installed with plextor manager, you can view an ordinary music cd as WAV files in explorer. the benifit of this is you can play it useing your favorite wave player like winamp, usualy ideal if you have a real good sound card like a sound blaster live that would give better audio quality then the built in DA converter in the cdrom itself. Its also usefull if you wanna rip music tracks off a cd, instead of loading up a ripping program, just drag and drop in explorer.)

If you want some program recomendations for the drive, I suggest CDRWIN, a long time favorit of mine, but does lack some of the easier configurations of EZCD.

Recommended: Yes