Caveat emptor!

[Soapy Sam]

It pays to read the small print.

Yesterday I bought a DVD writer. Oh, I read what it said on the boxes, but nowhere among all the day-glo superlatives on those multilingual, multilettered boxes did it state that DVD-RW and DVD+RW mean two quite incompatible systems, which happen to sit on the same shelf.
So last night I disembowelled the pc twice, fiddled with ATAPI and EIDE settings, hunted drivers on the net and generally lost half the night trying to get the new toy to read DVD-R discs.
Today, I called Philips tech support. After being shunted to three different numbers- one of them a Chinese restaurant in London- (No kidding. The lady was polite, but puzzled, as a good Chinese Restaurateur would be , when asked about DVD standards.)
Two polite Indian sounding gentlemen gave me conflicting advice, (both wrong). Third time lucky- a Dutch accent this time-
"Philips DVD writers don't use DVD minus Discs."
"Minus? I thought that was a hyphen. What is this 'minus'?".
"A different standard sir. Different dyes.You need DVD+R discs."
And he was right.
But it would be nice if that had been made clear in the shop.

Anyone have a use for 20 DVD-R discs? Going cheap.

[Skeptoid]

When I recently had a cold, my mom dropped by with a few packages of Nissin® Cup Noodles (Much More Than a Soup®). The noodle soup comes in a shrink-wrapped rigid styrofoam cup within an open cardboard wrapping. On the outer wrapping it says "MICROWAVE DIRECTIONS ON LID". Once you muscle the outer wrapping apart, here's what it says on the lid:

MICROWAVE DIRECTIONS:

Due to variance in microwave heating power, and for safety, we do not recommend microwave cooking.

:rolleyes: :D

[xouper]

Soapy Sam: It pays to read the small print.More small print:
http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html

[evildave]

I made the same mistake when I had a DVD-R drive. Of course, once the package was opened, the DVD+R media could not be returned. Two hours in the car to return it anyway.

Now I have a DVD+/-R drive. I still burn mostly CDRs with it.

Most DVD drives wouldn't read DVD-R discs when the DVD-R drives were fairly new! You'd burn a disc, and it would only be readable in another DVD-R drive, or (if you were very lucky) a DVD drive or two that you have access to. Getting something to play in a regular DVD player? Laughable.

There's still a substantial installed base of them that won't read DVD-R.

DVD+R seems to be more compatible with other computer drives. It's still hit-or-miss with any given consumer DVD player. Once the packaging's gone, most people can't tell you if their DVD player will recognize burned discs. So, you COULD transfer all your home movies to video, to capture them into the computer, to burn a DVD to give to people as a gift... but it's not a given that the recipients will be able to play it. Isn't that nice?

Ahh, the joy of "Microsoft Standards". It doesn't have to work with anything else, just "Microsoft". And it really doesn't need to work all that well with Microsoft - just look at the state of PC technology and quality. I personally get about a 33% failure rate with hardware that I buy. That's right, about one in three things I buy ends up being taped up with an RMA number on it. At the local pack & ship place, I'm "Mr. RMA". For real. They call me that.

My monitor only works at its native DVI resolution if I "trick" Windows into displaying it that way.

My new computer still has a baffling "mystery bug" that makes it just flat-out die with full-screen garbage. About once a day. They sent me another video card. It didn't crash: it had little random speckles flickering all over the display. Naturally they couldn't see it when they got the *even worse* card back. Probably, it would all go away if I re-configure the system so it boots without the RAID controller, but that would be a massive pain.

I have a USB2 network adaptor that makes the computer blue-screen (or blow away the NVRAM RAID settings) about a second after it's plugged in. Hurray for technology.

I get non-stop "help me" requests from other people, who claim their computer is "BROKEN". Usually their problems are purely software (or ignorance based) that can be solved in five minutes, but the technical support morons follow their script and conclude "it's the hardware" and hang up. They'll even tell me it's "DEAD" when it boots fine, and just can't open a PARTICULAR web page.


So basically, computers a generally screwed from any angle you'd care to view them from.

[Soapy Sam]

Xouper- absolutely. My fault. Still, the guys in the store could have been a lot more help. Serve me right for impulse buying in a PC Store. Admitting my mistake here just may stop someone else doing the same though.