Rating: 
Summary: Good product, decent software
Review: Although I have yet to truly put my CD-RW through its paces, I can say that the burns I have made have worked very well in cheap CD-ROM drives. To me, this is definitely a plus. Also, the burning software is fairly intuitive - another plus. *Disclaimer: I'm a geek. Things that are intuitive to me are far from intuitive for my parents. I will say, however, that since I hadn't really done my homework ahead of time, I wasn't quite sure what settings to choose in the burning software. I would have liked to have seen better explanations of the different options in the manuals, and maybe even a section with tips for when to use which settings. Also, the "packet-writing mode" for CD-RW seemed quite slow to me, but since I'm one of the few people I know with a CD-RW, perhaps this is normal. Just estimating, I would say that it is faster than a floppy, but a shade slower than a zip drive. I've heard that CD burners can wear out with time, and I'm curious to see how long this one lasts. So far, so good. *knock on wood*
Rating:
Summary: Not too shabby for the price
Review: Although it's not the fastest writer on the block, it's a solid value at ($) or less. The RW software that comes bundled does not work with Windows 2000, so you'll have to find something else to do RW work. The Nero CD-R software is easy to use, especially for the novice. All in all, a good bargain.
Rating:
Summary: Not too shabby for the price
Review: Although it's not the fastest writer on the block, it's a solid value at ($) or less. The RW software that comes bundled does not work with Windows 2000, so you'll have to find something else to do RW work. The Nero CD-R software is easy to use, especially for the novice. All in all, a good bargain.
Rating: 
Summary: This dude works great
Review: Before you buy this writer you have to ask yourself what are you buying this for.If you need to burn a lot of cd's continously then you should better by a plextor writer but if like me you are only buying this writer for home use, to create your own music cd's or make backups then go ahead and buy it. It's cheap,fast, and you have the creative name on it.
Rating: 
Summary: Wasted time!
Review: Creative Labs was the originator who brought both sound and CD-ROMs to the home computer, so I thought they would be a great brand to start creating CDs with. I was oh so wrong! I am a Windows 98 user with a Hewlett Packard computer and 64 MB of RAM, and with all of this I still had great difficulty in creating CDs. First off, if you want a CD Audio disc made, it puts 2 second gaps between the tracks ALWAYS! Making it non compatable with top CD making software like Easy CD Creator. Then, its also very difficult to even get it to burn a data CD without errors and the most aggrivating part of it is that half of the time it will not even recognize a CD is in the drive! Tech support is quite bad for the product as well, they send you documents to answer your question via email instead of live help.
Rating: 
Summary: Problems with Creative Labs CDRW
Review: I bought a Creative Labs CDRW last summer - and as a computing professional I must say it is one of the least reliable pieces of machinery I've bought for a PC in a long time. Within 5 months the RW function had died, several months later the music recording function died. Finally, the data recording went and I was left with a terrible investment. You should look into SCSI CDRW's and probably look at other brands before buying a "cheap" Creative Lab product.
Rating:
Summary: So Far So Good...No complaints
Review: I bought Creative's CD-RW drive mainly because it's cheaper than HP and other top manufacturers, plus you have that Creative brand name. With all the I've heard of unreliable CD-RW drives and unsuccessful burning attempts that result in your CDRs becoming coasters, I was sure that I would face the same problems. However, in the past 3 months, I've successfully burned 18 CDRs and had only one unsuccessful burn. My computer is a Pentium 3 with 500 plus Megahertz, 128MB and yada yada... basically it's a FAST multimedia PC (running on Win 98) and that fact perhaps may have helped in the performance of this CD-RW drive. Tip: Upgrade your slow computer to a fast one because the success of a burn depends on the writing speed of your CD-RW drive which in turn depends on the speed of your PC. Installing is a breeze; once you pop the drive into your CPU, just turn it on and the system automatically recognises the new drive, you don't need any drivers. After that, install the Nero Burning ROM software that comes with the package. Nero is simple to use and straightforward that it took only ten minutes for me to figure out the burning process. The interface comprises of windows that shows all your directories/folders/files and all you need to do is to click and drag the files (that you want to burn) into the CD-RW drive window, then press the burn button in the toolbar. Of course you must insert the CD-R/RW in the drive first; a cool thing I found was that I could just push the loading tray in by hand to close the drive, no need to push the "in" button. The CD-RW software, Prassi abCD is also good; easy to install and use. One rule I stick by: don't run other programs while burning There are certain things you can do to help maintain the life of your CD-RW drive. First, don't overwork the drive by burning CDRs continuously one after another. I never burn more than 3 CDRs in one day. Secondly, although this CD-RW drive works as a CD-ROM as well, it would be better to have separate drives; CD-ROM purely for reading and CD-RW drive purely for burning/writing. Once I put into my CD-RW drive, a music CD which has specks of dust on the reading surface and I immediately regretted it. Luckily the dust did not get into the drive and interfere with the burning. Some of the negative reviews posted here may be unwarranted because often it's NOT the product but THE WAY people use that product that determines its success. With Creative's excellent 8432 CD-RW drive, I've had one successful burn after another, so I heartily recommend it especially for those with a fast computer.
Rating:
Summary: Avoid like the Plague!!!
Review: I got this burner in the Christmas of 2000, it was a great price, offered a fast burn speed and it was a name brand product. However don't be fooled by this piece of junk burner, it just plain out [stinks]! The burner itself can't even burn to 80min CD's even if the CD-R box says they are compatable, this left me high and dry since virtually every store in town carried only 80min CD's. After visiting the Creative Labs Website for a possible firmware update, I found that the firmware update was only to Windows 98 and wouldnt even work with my CREATIVE LABS 8432 saying I had some 8438E burner (the box said it was a 8432), it appears there are serval slightly different versions of this burner. Trying to contact Creative I was lead around on how it should be on a seperate IDE cable and try different media they eventually told me that I was simply out of luck.
Overall This burner is not worth the hassle, go with someone who actually supports there products. Creative stick to sound cards..
Rating:
Summary: BIGGEST WASTE OF MONEY!!!!
Review: I purchased the 8432 for two reasons: 1-Creative had always beend good to me; 2-The price was right. Never again will I let assume that just because a company has made good products in the past that they always make quality products. I have made more coaster than CD's with this burner, and even when it does burn a CD successfully it is no guarantee that it will actually work. The software that comes with it is without a doubt the worst piece of garbage I have seen, it doesn't recognize many ,akes of blank CD, and no other burning software recognizes the drive. I contacted Creative Labs about a month after buying the burner (a month that I spent updated drivers, installing software patches, and trying other burning programs which would not work), and found out that I did not have an 8432, they had upgraded the firmware to an 8438 (which was supposedly a better revision of the 8432 firmware). After 2 hours on the phone, the tech (who was pleasant) told me that there was nothing he could do, I was up to date on all my software & drivers. He was stumped, but told me he would pass the info onto the R&D department to see if they could come up with a solution, and would call me back after they examined the problem. Well about 4 weeks later he did call back, and told me that they have no idea why I experienced all of the problems I had. His recommendation was to throw away the burner and buy a new one! I gave this item 1 star, ONLY because they would not let me leave it as none!!!!
Rating:
Summary: BIGGEST WASTE OF MONEY!!!!
Review: I purchased the product partly because of the low price. I could write a few CD's under Win 98 (sometimes the program just stopped running, and I had to turn off the computer, then turned on again to remove the disk--to throw it away). But I had a HD crash, and I switched to Win NT 4. Since then, I have had problems using Nero. It could not write on CDR, (honestly, very rarely it could write, but afterwards when the CD is read, it is really slow, or none at all). My tentative conclusion is that the software (Nero) is not quite compatible with Win NT4 (an update from .... I installed did not solve the problem). I plan to buy another brand-name product in the near future to replace the unused Blaster CDRW, in which the writing software is not Nero.
|
