The worst Sony CD-Recorder!
Written: May 25 '01
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Pros: Nobody comes into my office and asks me to burn a CD for them.
Cons: I cannot burn a CD for myself either
The Bottom Line: This Sony is waste. Waste of time buying and installing, trying it out, uninstalling, returning the product. If you keep it (as I do) then it's a waste of electricity.
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| ptiemann's Full Review: Sony Spressa CRX 140E CD-RW Burner |
When I started in this new job 2 months ago, I got a brand-new Compaq PC. The employer had added a Sony CRX 140E ('Spressa') CD-RW recorder to it. While the brand Compaq doesn't tell me "quality", I expected that the Sony CD-RW recorder would be good.
Not everyone here in our institute has a CD-RW recorder, so there were already a few people coming over asking me to burn various CDs for them. So far I haven't done any. Well, I did try!
The GOOD about the Sony recorder
* Comes with a free CD-R. Cool!
* Due to problems, nobody asks me for CD-burning favors anymore. More quiet time in my office!!!
The BAD
* I installed Nero 5 CD burning software. Nero 5 does not recognize this burner!
* I installed 'NTI CD-Maker 2000 Professional' in Version 4.1.46. This recognizes and supports this Sony model, as also listed in their README.TXT file.
When I burnt a data disc of ~ 160 MB with a four-level deep directory structure, the burn software reported about 100 invalid files afterwards. It turned out that the deepest directory was not written properly, and none of its 100 files was accessible. The CD looked fine in Windows Explorer including the damaged files. Only they could not be opened. I tried burning this image several times and wasted more than the free CD-R media. It always failed on the same files. We use here "certified TDK CD-R" discs, so that's not the problem. The total path length on that CD-ROM is less than 80 characters, so that's not the problem.
The Compaq PC is a 1-GHz machine with 512 MB of RAM. That's more RAM than I was going to write CD data!!! The problem is not the PC hardware but the CD burner. Or maybe the software?
* So I tried Sony's burn software "Sony CD Extreme".
Of all the burn software this one has the worst user interface that I have seen. I can drag folders onto the to-burn-list, but I cannot open them in the list. There are more shortcomings to this software but I thought if it's working, then it's better than the other software packages.
As you can imagine, "Sony CD Extreme" produced another coaster.
Summary
(Quotes from the product box)
Sony CD-RW Recorder.
High Speed RELIABLE Recording.
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Sony's CD Extreme and abCD.
Simply the best software available.
The BEST SOFTWARE available? I like Notepad a lot better. I even like any other CD creator software better.
The only thing that I like is that nobody bothers me to burn CDs for them. Not sure if that is a plus for the home user :-|
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): don't know
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
ptiemann
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Member: Peter Tiemann
Location: Capitola, CA
Reviews written: 260
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