Uncreative Labs

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

and the warning from a well-intentioned friend that ALL CD-R's Fade in a year or so

Walter, sorry to disagree but tell your "well-intentioned" friend that's just plain B-S. We've discussed it here before, and cheap CD-R's/DVD+/-R's stored in high humidity and broad daylight may not last a week. But a high-quality disc stored properly should keep 10 years or better. I'm still using the discs I burned with my first burner (an HP SureStore 7200e Parallel-Port 2x) back in 1997. Trusting data to something electromechanical like a floppy or hard-drive is just begging to lose it, and with the cost of both burners and media so cheap now, it doesn't pay to use anything else. CD-R's themselves are long past being standard fare on a new machine, and a good DVD-writer is now under $40...

http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=DVD

http://www.pacificgeek.com/showcategory.asp?c=200&s=975&fi=&offset=&orderby=&prodperpage=all

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

I think BS is a little strong.
yes I agree with the part about cheap cd-r's and high humidity.
I looked on the www and sometimes the opinions expressed are llike you know what's everybody has one.
but there seems to be some substance to that opinion
they stressed it was not the BRAND of the cd[-r
but the ACTUAL manufacturer.
if the disk is made my a decent company and supposed lo there are only 2-4, THEN the disk will last.
But if you buy a memorex or tdk- good companies
you may or may NOT get the same or the best blank disk.

because of these uncertainies, one person, who seemed to have the proper credentials, that the safest was a hard disk.
I agree that a hard disk can suddenly develoop errors, and floppies get erased or unreadable just walking accroiss a room.

we are getting fairly far from finding drivers, but sites come and go ( mostly go away)
and it's up to us to store them so we can access them later
example: i went on the microsolutions site and glad i did, because the company was out of business, A few months later so was the site.

hey BE NICE I have gone over this post to check it.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

But if you buy a memorex or tdk- good companies
you may or may NOT get the same or the best blank disk.

Yes, most everyone knows the list:

http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm

But are you willing to bet on Chinese-made hard drives over Taiwanese-made DVD media? (I'm not...)

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

I was on that site
even in the short term, it is often hard to make a good copy of as cd
I amost have given up.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Quote:

it is often hard to make a good copy of as cd

What problems are you having? I've never really had any trouble (whether using Nero or Adaptec) creating copies of CD's or DVD's.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

wud about flash? not cheap. i know, but can last up to 50 years(as im told) mabey thats why people are shoving them into xt's and pc's.
and on the dvd subject, stay the hell away from chinese crap, i rather trust an old verbatim floppy over a chinese disc.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

I'd still question the reliability of some flash drives (especially in a case where it's being written to frequently):

http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/storage/0,239029473,240063522,00.htm

I've had 2 of them fail, however opinion on it does seem to be improving:

http://www.supertalent.com/tools/ssd.php

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

ive come too one conclusion.... everything fails, nothing is safe, listen well everyone, no such thing as reliable media! just to be sure, with your important data, make 3-15 copies on differnt formats, and back-up frequently.
good thing my hdd only has some cd iso that has already bean burt like to 10 disc and flatout2 modding stuff from flatoutjoint.com and windows 2000, plus sony vegas 5 and a copy of half-life 2.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Oddly enough (speaking of flash media), I'm trying something out while "voluntarily unemployed". In the process of working on some machines, I'm tinkering with a 233MHz/64MB-RAM P1 machine running Win98SE (with all updates/fixes & IE6). It also has OpenOffice 2.3, Firefox 2.0.0.11, Opera 9.24, ClamWin, IrfanView 3.97, WinAmp 2.95, FoxIt PDF Reader 2.2, 102MB of games and it's only using around 330MB of a 700MB HDD. The reason for so little HDD usage? Everything except the O/S and IE6 (and the swapfile) resides on a 512MB USB flash disk (with about 88MB free). OpenOffice, ClamWin, Firefox and Opera are the "USB-versions" and everything else runs fine without any real modifications (most of the games except Microsoft Pinball Arcade are older Windows 3.1 games). Even though it's a USB 1.1 port, WinAmp has no problem playing 160KB/s MP3's off the 24x CD drive without a hitch, even when surfing the net with Opera, and all other apps are about as "snappy" as they'd be running straight off the HDD. Next experiment: see if I can make Nero 6 "portable" and use it to burn to an external CDRW...

Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 10:30 pm

Have u tried thinstall to make Nero porable ?

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

I actually appear to have found a better alternative. I'd seen DeepBurner Portable before, but hadn't really tried it out. Today I did so and am quite impressed. Installed it on a (different) 512MB blank USB flash disk, and then was actually able to burn files to a CD in an external USB DVD burner using a hub (older machine--PackardBell Multimedia 730--266MHz Cyrix--64MB RAM--4GB HDD--running Win2K/SP4) since there was only a single USB port on the machine. Had to tweak things by making the buffer 32MB and changed the settings of the tempfiles/buffer from the default to "C:\Temp1". First try before tweaking was an immediate failure, but afterwards, everything ran fine (took 9 minutes to burn about 400MB @ 8X and even though the buffer continually drained and refilled, there were no errors---even checked the burned disk on another machine and no problems!). Given the specs of the machine, and the fact that it burned a CD through a single USB 1.1 port through a hub @ 8X, I gotta say it really seems to fit the bill (especially considering it's only around 7MB when unzipped). Portability is such a cool thing! Smile

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

http://www.opendrivers.com/driver/214513/msi-ms-8801-trident-9880-blade-3d-driver-windows-nt-free-download.html

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

http://www.opendrivers.com/categorycompany/16/1580/scanner-minolta-free-driver-download.html