I have had the worst time getting an external DVD. My husband bought me a Mad Dog 18x external at CompUSA for our anniversary. The first thing I noticed after hooking it into my laptop (and then later into our desktop) is that it wouldn’t burn 16x rated media at more than 6x. (I later tested our internal Benq DW1650 and on the same media it burns at 11.1x when set to 16x–so I know there is sometimes some variable between set speed and actual write speed but the above seems to be a significant amount. I returned it for another of the same make and model hoping I had just gotten a bad drive. This one wouldn’t write any faster than 4x! And it made a grinding noise. So I returned it and decided to try the generic brand (sometimes you get a better deal that way. We bought a HI-Val brand internal dvd from frys and it ended up being the BENQ so hey I was hoping for another miracle here). This one wouldn’t even copy movie files to the hard drive using DVD decrypter (all tests were done using the BENQ as the control duplicating the settings and image files/discs/etc).
I really want a good external I can hook up to my laptop. Any suggestions? I know our BENQ works better than our generic that came with our pc. My laptop only has a cdwriter+dvdplayer. Both our systems have 170GHz machines though the desktop has 1G of RAM and my laptop only 384mB. If it’s not a matter of buying locally, perhaps someone can point me to a good brand/online retailer for my needs? I want to spend about as much as hubby did on the intial gift which was about $80USD. Thanks a bunch!!!