Great Storage, Great CDs, Horrible Documentation
Written: Dec 28 '99
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good hardware, Makes both CD-R and CD-RW
Cons: Lousy documentation
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| woodyq's Full Review: Philips PC Internal CDRW 400 Series |
I received my Philips PC Internal CD-RW 400 as a Christmas gift, and fortunately the person that gave it to me knew a bit about why I'd like to have one. Fast data storage, and making my own music CDs. If you can figure out how to use it, this system will let you do both.
I've been using a tape backup for the past 4 years, and while that's worked well enough, it's slow, and it's really a pain trying to find a single file on a tape. I've heard horror stories from friends and family about Zip drives. I wanted something that was relatively fast, easy to access through Windows Explorer, and lots of cheap space.
I've had a couple days to mess around with it, and now that I've determined how to use it, I think it works quite well. You see, that's the major problem with this unit - almost no documentation and a very minimal help file. I've read the other reviews on this product, and it seems that most of the negative ones are from people that had the same problems I had, but I just kept changing things and messing around until I figured out a way to get it to do what I wanted.
The software interface seems pretty intuitive, but guessing and clicking just doesn't seem to work very well. Click "Help" and you get an HTML file that comes up in your browser, and does a great job of stating the obvious stuff you already know, and has absolutely no information on any of the stuff that might help you understand the important things. Like, "Why does it seem that files are being recorded, but when I try to look at the files on the disk, NOTHING IS THERE!" The FAQ deals only with the most mundane questions, and mostly concerning audio recordings.
Installation was smooth. I even hooked it up (against owners manual recommendations) as a forth IDE drive on my system, 2 hard drives, 2 CD drives. And in a way, that just makes it more aggravating, because the hardware worked great from the beginning, but the software wouldn't let me tell it what I wanted to do.
I made a few audio CDs with only minor hangups. I was scared that the system would only do CD-RW, which will only work on computer CD drives, not a "boombox", but this unit also makes CD-Rs which you can play on any CD player. Worked great. I've got one on my system, but you don't need to have a secondary CD player to record from one to another.
I tried several times to record some data on a CD-RW using their software, with little success, until I figured out that I could just use their software to format the disk, and then use Windows Explorer to move it from a hard drive to the CD. Success, at last.
All in all, it seems to be good hardware, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't know a pretty good bit about using their computer. If Philips thinks it's cheaper to pay the live Tech Support folks, than it is to pay someone to print a decent manual, then that's their business.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
woodyq
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Reviews written: 3
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