by Derek Sims on Mon Nov 11, 2002 5:21 pm
Dear CDR Labs
I have decided to contact you from the UK having found your excellent website, as I am sure you can help me in my search for a good DVD ROM drive, mainly to play DVD movies. Just to give a little background to my request:
When we had our desktop PC built in late 1999 we asked for a DVD ROM drive so we could play DVD movies and audio Cds. The machine is a 433 Mhz Celeron which now has 192 MB RAM and was supplied with a Raite RDR 102 DVD drive. The operating system is Windows 98.
The machine would not play DVD movies with a software decoder such as PowerDVD, giving extremely jerky results. I had read that it was necessary to enable DMA but this option was not even available in the Windows settings with this particular drive. To resolve the problems we bought a hardware decoder, the REALmagic Hollywood Plus. This resolved the jerkiness but the drive refused to recognise a number of DVDs or froze partway through. All of the “faulty” DVDs played perfectly in a stand-alone DVD player when returned to the library from which they were borrowed. I tried cleaning the Laser several times.
About eighteen months ago the drive stopped recognising any audio CD as even being present. This was not a major problem as we bought a TDK CyCLone CDRW, but recently it has refused to recognise most of the DVDs we try to play. (It does, however, always play the one DVD we own, a second-hand copy of The Usual Suspects). As I now have a DVD drive in my laptop at work I have been able to check the Disks and they have all played perfectly.
We have now decided it is time to dump the original DVD but because of our frustrating experiences we want to give ourselves the best chance of being able to play movies. The drive in my HP laptop is a Toshiba so I was inclined to the SD-M1612, which I believe is being replaced by the SD-M1712 but from reading your reviews I would also shortlist the Pioneer A06S and the Lite-On LTD163.
Bearing in mind our history of problems, and that to us saving money is secondary to having a drive which avoids the three years of frustration we have experienced, could you make any specific recommendations from your tests? Most of the drives you have reviewed appear to be available in the U.K.
Anxiously hoping for your reply
Kind regards
Derek Sims
