Daze said:
I just installed an old HP CD-Writer 9100 series on a computer running
Win98SE. The drive itself seems fine, but HP's burning software craps
out on this computer. As soon as I start to select a file or folder to
start a list for burning to a data CD, a Blue Screen of Death pops up,
freezing everything and forcing a reboot. Happens every time and all I
can figure is some incompatiblity between the software and the computer.
So my question is:
What do folks here recommend for a free alternative to burning software
that should work with this older (internal) HP burner and Win98SE?
Daze
I like Exact Audio Copy very much. It's powerful, flexible, and offers
different ways to custom-fit your drive. It's got good manners and works
marvelously. This program is not just for copying nasty scratched CDs,
but can build up a disk from loose files, just like Roxio, Nero, etc.
However, its file types are more limited, although its range encompass
..wav encoding, which is standard enough.
It is not easy to figure out, however. But at the cost of a few wasted
CDRs, you should achieve success. The program has been tested with a
number of existing drives to offer good pre-configurations. In other
cases, it performs tests on the drive to establish its custom criteria.
I recently made myself a nifty disk of wake-up music for my CD alarm
clock. It's 13th century (medieval) English church music -- very
primitive, etheric, and wonderful -- a fine way to enter the world of
wake from the world of sleep. My disk contains short music pieces
separated by 10-minute selections of silence -- in other words, a
do-it-yourself snooze alarm. What I wanted was a disk that doesn't play
piece after piece in instant succession, but just one short piece, and
then stop. I want to wake up very pleasantly, not listen to an entire
album for entertainment.
Exact Audio Copy made the assemblage flawless. I wish that I could say
the same thing about the lousy Sony CDR disks, however -- the ones I
have are off-spec; they wobble in the RCA radio's cheap CD drive, and
skip in my car's CD player: fine in good hi-fi component-quality CD
players, but in the clock radio, I can see the disk wobbling all over
the place as the music skips. The problem vanished when I used Fuji
disks (made by Taiyo Yuden -- a manufacturer trusted by professionals).
TY disks are really hard to find retail, but I don't trust most major
brands any more (TDKs say "India" on them now, as they, too, lunge to
the cheapest labor they can find). As an audio person, I want to be
confident in my media -- I've had too many hassles from sub-standard
stuff to want to fool around.
I once brought home a new HP CD drive and read the manual before
unpacking the hardware. The manual said that I could have all the
"award-winning" phone support I could eat for $2 per minute. I
immediately put the manual back in the box and took it back for a
refund. I've been using a Plextor burner ever since, and I've been very,
very happy with their free support, as well as the quality of the
burner. But, of course, if I got a free HP drive, I'd want to take it
for a spin. With free hardware, as with free software, I'll put up with
bad or no support (what do you want for nothing?). However, when I pay
money, the folks who made it better damn well make themselves available
to answer questions by phone. email support doesn't cut it, in my
experience.
My 2 cents.
Richard
