CD-Writer 9150i -- Nice for the price
Written: Jan 01 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Easy to install. Burns CD-RW. Works under Windows ME
Cons: Not reliable in 8x write mode, software not as flexible as others
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| adjensen's Full Review: Hewlett Packard CD-Writer 9100i CD-RW Burner |
After many weeks of trying, I finally gave up on getting my external CD burner to work with Windows ME. But I had a ton of stuff on my two ME machines that I needed to burn to a cd, particularly backups of key work documents. So I went over to Office Depot and looked at the internal drives.
They had this one, which is 8x burn, 4x rewrite and 32x read, on sale for $179 with a $30 rebate. They had a 10x burner for about $50 more and a 12x for about $100 extra, but I figured that 8x would be fine (the external one that I have only burns at 2x).
I brought it home (along with an Ethernet card and a 40gig hard disk) and cracked open my eMachines 566i2 to install it. The plan was to remove the existing CD-ROM drive and replace it with this and install the new hard drive in the extra bay.
(An aside here -- the long term plan is to put the old CD-ROM back into the computer in the lower bay and mount the hard drive somewhere inside -- that way I can do CD to CD copying, and reduce wear and tear on the CD-R by having the CD-ROM for general use.)
As is usually the case, it took far longer to open and close the computer case than it took to actually install the drive. The drive comes with a program that you can run before you do any installation and it will print out how you need to set the jumpers on the back of the drive. I didn't take advantage of that -- I just set the jumpers to be the same as they were on the original CD-ROM.
Installing the software once the computer was back together was a simple process. From the moment that I opened the box to when I was able to burn a cd was probably about 20 minutes, half of which was getting the stupid computer cover on and off.
The software ("HP MyCD") seems to be more reliable under Windows ME than the software included with my other drive (Adaptec Easy CD), but it has one annoying feature -- if you have files with really long file names (longer than 110 characters,) Easy CD offers to shorten them for you, but HP MyCD simply refuses to burn the CD and tells you to go shorten them yourself.
I burned two cds fine at 8x, and then started having problems that I can't track down. It now cannot burn at 8x. There is an override that you can set in the software to limit it to 4x, and at that rate there are no problems, but I've wasted a half dozen cds trying to get 8x to work. In the past, I've seen similar problems with other burners, and moving down to the next lower speed always resolves it, but it's very disappointing to have to cut the burn rate in half.
For reliable cd burning on an IDE drive such as this, you need to not run any other software, and try and leave the computer alone as much as possible. That seems to have no effect on getting this to burn at 8x, so I guess that I'll just live with 4x (about 18 minutes for a full cd). I suspect that I would have better results with a SCSI drive, but I don't have a SCSI card in this box, so there would be too much to buy to get the speed boost.
I'm not going to return the drive because, like I said, this seems to be pretty systemic of cd burners and I doubt that a new one would change anything.
When all is said and done, though, it's great to finally have a burner that works under Windows ME, and I feel better for having backed up all of my stuff. And for $150, you can't beat the price of this burner.
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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