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 Posted by billanderson on 08/08/06 13:51 
I work in a small office -- we have about 10 Dell desktop computers for 
staff use.  The computers are a few years old and there's no chance of 
replacing them any time soon.  None of the computers has even a CD 
burner, much less a DVD burner.  They do have CD drives, read-only. 
One of the computers -- ONE -- has a DVD drive, read-only.  They're P-4 
1.5 GHz, 512 GB RAM. 
 
Occasionally we receive in the mail a work-related DVD we'd like to 
view, or we receive data on a DVD, and we end up bumping from her desk 
the poor woman who has the only DVD drive in the office.  Also, 
occasionally, we'd like to burn a CD or DVD.  Or, as happened 
yesterday, we receive a CD burned by someone who doesn't know what he's 
doing and we discover the CD hasn't been finalized.  None of our drives 
would read it.  I had to take the disk home overnight and finalize it 
on my personal computer. 
 
So I want to propose to the office manager that we invest in at least 
one DVD burner for the office.  And if the cost isn't prohibitive, 
perhaps we can purchase five or six for key people. 
 
I found this deal at NewEgg: 
 
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Category.asp?Category=10 
 
$28.99 is a pretty good price.  I think NEC is a good brand -- 
dependable  hardware.  But apparently these drives don't come with 
software -- they're OEM.  If they do come with software, they don't 
mention it in the NewEgg ad. And price really is a concern here.  So 
here's my question: 
 
Can anybody recommend a good deal -- drive price in the $30 range -- 
that includes decent CD/DVD burning software?  Or can you recommend 
some freeware CD/DVD burning software that would play nicely with the 
NEC drive? 
 
Also, I noticed on that NewEgg page a retail LiteOn drive for $33.25. 
It comes with Nero and PowerDVD, though I can't tell whether they are 
full versions or stripped down. Also, I am suspicious of the LiteOn 
brand.  Are LiteOn drives dependable?  Would you recommend them for 
office use?  It would be light use -- we need their capability only 
occasionally. 
 
Other recommendations?  Thanks. 
 
Bill Anderson
 
  
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