How come CDFreaks or anyone else for that matter does not do any reviews of any slim external or any laptop burners? I am looking to get a new one, but I can't any good info on any of them. Right now i have a LiteOn SDW-200DX. It burns pretty good albeit slowly. I don't mind the slowness, but I would like to get a USB powered one. It is a very poor reader however and there doesn't seem to be any firmware help coming soon. The disc has to be in pristine condition for it to work and how often is that the case. It only seems to work with RecordNow 4.6 that it came with. I tried Nero, CDBurnerXP, DeepBurner, etc. None worked. I did get DVD Decrypter to burn a few discs. I also had a NEC ND-5500a that was better, but it went when I sold my old notebook and you can't find them anymore. I need an external anyway. I know reviews tend to be retail products and laptop drives tend to be OEM, but the external ones are all retail and would give insight into the drives they are based on. There are a lot of forums that are burning or laptop centric, where quite a few posts relating to dvd burners. Anyway anyone with any info on what is good and what is not would be mucho appreciated. Thanks.