Thursday 5 August 2004

Pic of the day: Still unopened. How did this happen?

Too many DVD burners

So I handed in the defective DVD burner to the shop where I had bought it, and showed my receipt and whined. They took it back, as well they could. (They'll no doubt get it fixed for free from the importer, or even get a new one.) I know from experience that such things take time. Regular readers may remember that repairing my PC took a couple months. In fact, the CD burner I handed in for repair (at another shop, admittedly) is still there, a year or two later. That one also malfunctioned and destroyed CDs, but DVDs are more expensive to have destroyed. Anyway, back then I bought a new LiteOn CD burner and have not missed the old one (of a forgettable brand). Therefore, I now proceeded to buy a LiteOn DVD burner as well.

Having two DVD burners is kinda luxurious, I admit. But that will only kick in weeks into the future, I told myself, and definitely long after my hard disk has run full. Besides, and this is not entirely unimportant, I currently have two PC's where the built-in DVD/CD reader is malfunctioning. Not just unreliable, but belly-up dead. The both of them happen to be Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo machines, which are otherwise among the better I have had. I believe I have had 1 desktop machine that has not had any faulty parts, a Goldstar AT with 10MHz processor and 20MB hard disk ... The extra hard disk I put in it is long dead, but the machine is still running. It forgets what time it is and what components it has when I turn it off, but apart from that it's quite fine. Also my two HP portables seem to be in perfect working order. There was also a desktop machine that I think worked fine until it died suddenly. But most of my machines (and I have been at this for some time, as you can see) have had faulty parts. Usually it is only a small defect, or it develops only after I have come to depend on the machine so I can't return it.

So what I'm saying is that unless I want to move the LiteOn CD-RW from one machine to another, it makes sense to have another unit. If it can also write DVDs, so much the better. So, after arguing with myself for a while, I bought a LiteOn DVD+-RW and brought it home. I also brought along the Roxio DVD burning software, which is a marvelous thing that integrates seamlessly with Windows XP and lets you simply drag and drop files to the DVD like any other hard disk. If rewriteable, it also lets you do other disk maintenance functions. Highly recommended.

***

I install Roxio on the newest Scaleo, uninstalling the less elegant and more self-asserting Nero. Life is good. Now to unpack the LiteOn and connect it. Except ... there is already a DVD writer? What's this? Turns out the DVD reader on this machine is actually a DVD writer as well. That's what I originally thought, but Nero was rather adamant that it could only write CDs on it. This, it turns out, was simply an artifact of the inferior software. I should have expected this much from a program named after a test run for the Antichrist, a guy who enjoyed destroying a substantial part of his capital city and blaming it on someone else.

So ... as of this writing, the LiteOn is still in its unopened box, in fact it is still in the carrying bag I carried it home in. I have seen no reason to open it thus far, and perhaps I never will. That's one portable PC and one DVD burner I've bought this summer that I'm likely to not use unless I wring my brain to come up with an excuse to use them. Quality products both, and together the two of them set me back nearly one month's pay (after tax). (I really don't earn much more than that, shocking as this may seem to those of you who live in meritocratic societies.) Luckily I haven't had many other expenses this summer. Still, it is rather embarassing.

But that's why I know people will enjoy reading it. One's own success is the best, but others' failures are not to be scorned either!