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Picture courtesy of Bobtec.
| Ease of Use | 9/10  |
|---|---|
| Ease of Set Up | 9/10 |
| Value for Money | 5/10 |
| Overall rating | 4/10 |
Full review by
BobTech
on 26th Feb 2006
User Rating : 4
Respect :
0
Good Points: Capable of reading and writing CD-R/RW and DVD-R/RW media (that's all I've tried it with). Comes with Nero V6 software CD to drive it. Has an earphone socket and volume control on the front. Supplied with both black and cream front covers to match your PC case.
Bad Points: Unable to write to generic 8x DVD-R media.
General comments: What can you say about a DVD drive? I installed the Lite-On SOHW-1693S DVD drive into my 1.7 GHz P4/Gigabyte GA-8IE motherboard PC, and it always wrote to CD-RW and CD-R blanks at full speed, but months later when I bought a spindle of cheap 8x DVD-R discs and tried to write to them at full speed, every one of about half a dozen I tried failed Nero's data verification test. It was OK at 4x speed. However, it wrote to Imation 4x DVD-RW discs perfectly OK. I downloaded new firmware for it from the Lite-On website in the hope that updating it would help. Every single time I tried to run the firmware updater program, it totally locked up my PC, forcing me to hit the reset button to restart it. I wasted a lot of time trying unsuccessfully to make it work in safe mode etc. Finally I removed this drive from my home PC and installed it in my work one. The firmware updater worked perfectly on it. However, I haven't yet tested the drive with the 8x DVD-R discs to see if it will write to them properly.
I bought and installed a Pioneer DVR-110D in my home PC, and it happily reads and writes all discs, including those 8x DVD-R ones without a hint of a problem.
There are a lot of DVD drives on the market. You don't have to get a Lite-On one. I recommend that you don't.
BobTech's review and ratings | 305 words | 1 comment added.
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