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

[Back to original message]