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For all UK members, I am glad to see that Amazon.co.uk does not seem to be selling any of the Emprex DVDRW drives anymore, however PC World is pushing both the 8x single layer burner and a 16x dual layer burner. I bought one of the 8x drives for £39 in PC World. I installed it and the problems started. First of all I noticed that when you placed any disk in (CD or DVD) Windows (XP Pro SP2) could see what sort of disk it was (ie CD-ROM, DVD Video etc) but would not actually read the disk. I then noticed that Windows was not sure what type of drive it was, sometimes showing t as a simple CD-ROM others as the DVDRW it actually is. I took it back to PC World and exchanged it for another. Got home and had exactly the same problem. Took it back and this time the shop insisted in testing it first (and found it would not work) so let me have the 16x model as a gesture of good will. You guessed it the same bloody thing. Finally got it chabged for an Artec 16X dual layer drive, which works fine!
What I did discover is that the Emprex drives actually do work, but not under Windows XP (despite the box claiming they do) because I was able to boot up from a bootable Linux CD with the second 8X Emprex drive!
Note I also discovered that other cheap burners on sale in PC World with different brand names are actually the same drive. One way to spot these is that they all come with an alternative black front as well as the standard white front. That is the one downside of my fully functional Artec drive, it is white sitting in a black and silver system! (just why are so many white/cream drives made when for the last 3 or 4 years most PCs are black and or silver?)
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