[Ham-Computers] DVD Outcome

[WA5CAB at cs.com]

Group,

Thanks to all who responded to the three threads.  I settled on a Plextor 
PX-716A drive and Verbatim +R media, which I located and purchased at Best Buy 
less than a mile from home.  Installed with no problems (I already had the 
mounting slot set up, with the cables qued up and waiting).  Following the 
suggested configuration in the accompanying manual, I set the older Yamaha CD-RW drive 
as Slave and the Plextor as Master.  

With a little more care during installation (used Custom instead of Typical, 
and didn't install the audio/video bells and whistles I don't currently need), 
Easy Media 7.0 installed and runs nearer to not even being visible than did 
Easy Cd 5.x.  In fact, the only thing I see that I don't approve of is when I 
eject a disk.  The default mode that I have set for ejecting has always been to 
not do anything else to the disk but spit it out.  That's so that It can be 
written to again.  The description for this now says something like "Leave so 
that disk can be accessed only in this computer", which is not technically 
correct.  It used to say something like "Leave so that disk can be accessed only 
from a computer running Easy CD or equivalent".  Which is still correct.  Only 
the prompt says otherwise.

It occured to me after I started running the new drive that there was no 
reason to arbitrarily convert roughly 2/3 of my TM backup CD-R's to DVD's if they 
aren't close to being full.  So I replaced only those categories requiring two 
or more CD's, and eliminated 9 CD's last night.

One thing that favorably impressed me about the Plextor drive is how fast it 
mounts and dismounts both DVD's and CD's compared to the Yamaha.  So much so 
that I'm going to replace it with a Plextor CD-RW drive.  So the Yamaha will 
shortly be available if someone needs a pretty decent IDE CD-RW drive.

The only thing wrong with the Plextor is that its face plate color doesn't 
match everything else on the front of my computer.  :-)


Robert Downs - Houston
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