Rating: 
Summary: too bad there isn't a choice for '0' stars...
Review: (...) This product is junk and so is the documentation. I gave this to my brother as a gift. I just returned it along with a long letter to the company. I have a good understanding of computers and after 5 hours of torture trying to get it to work, I gave up.
The manual is obviously written by someone with 3rd grade writing skills. It also assumes the reader has been installing drivers for the last 3 years in a shop somewhere. I can't imagine how novices would get this drive installed. Finally, you know the product's bad when a yellow piece of paper insert says, 'check with us before you return this product...' I called the number and received a recording that was not helpful and left a message that was never returned. I'll try another brand.
Rating: 
Summary: Good CDRW for the Price
Review: 3 stars, middle of the road. This CDRW is average, burns well, but not great, runs fast, but not very quiet, pretty reliable, but gets hot fast. For the $80 I paid for mine, I'd say IO got $80 worth of CDRW. Granted it's not a 32X Plextor, but it has some great qualities as well. You may have noticed that the only complaints are fron users with poor technical skills. If you go to Roxio's website and download the updates for EZCD 5, you can use EZCD Creator with no problems. Nero is better, but not as user friendly or feature laden. For those that are worried about installing it - just put the plastic jumper on the MA pins in the back, plug the end of your ribbon cable into the back and the other end into the slot marked IDE 2 on your motherboard and your done. Or if you only need one drive, just make the plastic jumper look like your old drive's setting and then swap 'em. EZ as pie.
Rating:
Summary: Great burner with little support
Review: Burns great but half of my software doesn't support it.
Non supported are GoldenHawk CDrWin and Roxio Video Pack.
Nero and DiskJuggler work fine with it. I sent several e-mails to their support team and have yet to receive a response.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of money
Review: I bought this drive for my daughter for Christmas. What a piece of junk! It rattled when I took it out of the box, and when I finally get it hooked to the computer the cd tray would only open half way. I at last got the tray to open and then I couldn't make the drive work. The documentation (if that is what they call it is horrible). Tech support is non-existent. Save yourself the time and aggravation and buy a name brand drive. I went out and bought a Western Digital drive installed it in 10 minutes and my daughter was burning CDs like she should have on Christmas Day.
Rating: 
Summary: Its really an Aopen CRW2440
Review: I got one of these for Xmas from my wife. I was a little disappointed that it was a generic until I did a little digging.
Retail Plus is actually a generic brand name from a company called Pine Technology.The CD-RW actually turned out to be a Aopen CRW2440 with Justlink and JustSpeed buffer overrun Technology. I upgraded the firmware to v2.02 (from 1.0) using the firmware from AOpen and the driver now reports that it is an Aopen CD-RW during PCI bus probing done during boot (used to not list any brandname). So it turns out I got a really good CD-RW for a great price. I have never had a problem with it. My only grip is that the InCD software from Nero is not as good as DirectCD. I liked using a CD-R disk like a floppy until you ran out of space. InCD only supports rewriteable disks. DISCLAIMER: I'm not sure if all the Retail Plus CD-RW drives are from Aopen. I just know mine was. You burn the firmware at your own risk...
Rating: 
Summary: Cheap cdrw means cheap quality
Review: I had a terrible time getting this to work on my Windows2000 computer. I had an old 2x CDRW with Adaptec DirectCD installed. After uninstalling Adaptec (as required to use Nero), and then reinstalling Nero, Windows2000 could no longer read
any CD-ROM or CD-RW devices any more due to a ASPI layer problem. I checked USENET newgroups and found that tons of people have this problem. So as a reminder, Windows2000and Adaptec DirectCD are NOT supported by this drive.
I have to reinstall Windows2000 again to get my CD-ROM to work again. In a word, "LOT'S OF PAIN". The support from their website (...) is a joke to say the least.
Rating:
Summary: Very satisfied !
Review: I have *never* installed anything so I was a bit hesitant to get any internal burner. It did take me a while to hook it up but none of the fault lies with the unit or the tech help. My components were spaced weird in the case and getting the cable to fit was my biggest problem. Ended up hooking my HD to the CD ROM on primary IDE and the CD RW to the Floppy/Imation & that worked. Ended up fighting with NERO software though, upgraded and then it would not copy a CD. Ended up playing with original CD rom and I am happily in business. For a "no name" unit, I am happy with the way it works and the cost I got it for.
Rating:
Summary: Retail Plus is awesome!
Review: I just bought a new Compaq Presario which might I add I didn't add a CDRW drive to my system. I picked up this one by Retail Plus, opened the box and installed it. So easy and so fast! Now I find myself making cds for not only for myself, but for my friends and family! This is so neat! Not to mention, this investment will pay for itself as you'll never buy another c.d. in the stores ever again! A smart buy! Everyone should have a cd burner, as well as a web cam, and a scanner!
Rating:
Summary: Very Fast and Easy to Install
Review: I know very little about computer hardware but I installed this cd drive and burned a CD in just a few minutes. I really dont know how I did it but I have a new CD and it works and sounds great. If everything could be added this easy people would upgrade more often. I am sure if you buy this CD-RW you will be very happy and it is so fast.
Rating:
Summary: Struggling
Review: I liked the way this product was packaged, easy instructions and so forth. The box lists tech support numbers and email, which I found comforting. I had read a review somewhere that liked the NERO software, which is included (the box doesn't actually say which software is included) I installed this on my NT 4.0 system. Hardware-wise installation was very simple - just a power cable and a flat ribbon cable to plug in. However, my system was very unstable after loading the "InCD" software (which is supposed to allow file-by-file writes) , it would crash within seconds of the desktop popping up. I am not sure of the exact cause. I emailed RetailPlus Techsupport, but they took over a week and three tries to get back to me. I suspect NT and onCD don't co-exist peacefully. The NERO webpage seemed a bit vague on this point. Our system administrator hates anything people do themselves, so he is not the most helpful guy, but he was able to recover my files from my hard-drive -- however he insisted on re-installing the operating system. Overall I've spent about 2 days to restore my system back the way I like it.
Scary, not much fun, and mucho embarraso around the office. One of the reasons I wanted a CD-R was to backup my harddrive, which I haven't done in ages, so the whole crashing business was rather ironic. Subsequently, I installed the drive and Nero on a totally different, Windows ME system. Seems like the drive WAS recoginzied by Windows PlugAndPlay automatically, and it worked fine as a CD-ROM. Bit noisy, door action clunky, plastic a bit cheap looking. Actually a PINE drive inside. Results, unfortunately, were similar - machine would CRASH shortly after boot-up. Very frustrating. Part of the great thing about your computer being down is you have no CD-ROM, no email, no web access to get to all the tech support info out there. I did a system restore to roll back the ME system to the point before installing NERO - no luck, still crashing. I am EXTREMELY annoyed on this point. I tried numerous other recovery technques, to no avail. I was able to boot in "safe" mode, and worst case, could have backed my files onto floppies. However, by lucky accident, my 7-year old booted the system with a disk in the CD-ROM player -- and it booted up! Some kind of bug where the something must be in the drive. Apparently was an old Win95 bug. Not sure why affecting WinME. Then, by careful reading of NERO tech support info, I deleted 4 driver files, and was able to get the system to boot. At this point I still haven't managed to burn a CD. (I put my original CD back in as part of the troubleshooting). I'm an electrical engineer and reasonable technical, but this was fiddling with things I just don't want to be bothered with. Nero is saying "update your Bios, update your chipset driver, update your CD firmware, fiddle with Windows files, etc" Summary
-crashed two different hardware systems (a Dell and an HP)
-crashed two different operating systems (NT4 SP6 and WinME)
-"system restore" did not roll back ME system properly
-Nero website info helpful, but very technical
-Backup, Backup, Backup before you start I realize now that tech support is essential, and I would look much more closely at "name brand" products in the future...
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