What's wrong with my cdrom drive?

[scourge]

I have a Digital Research Technologies 24x cdrom drive that I bought from CompUSA a while back. It was $100 w a $50 mail-in rebate. I thought it was a good deal at the time. Here's the problem. I originally had a cyrix 5x86-120 system that I installed it into. I always had problems with it. Choppy video, spin-up, spin-down, etc. I just thought my computer was to slow for games, etc. that I was trying to run. Now I have it in my AMD K6-2 400 system. It runs exactly the same. Games that are cdrom intensive (i.e. Diablo), crash constantly. I was using win 95 on my cyrix system, now I'm using win 98. No difference. Is this thing just a lemon or what? I still have the box, can I return it even though I cut off the bar code for the mail-in rebate? One thing is for sure, I won't be buying another DRT product.

[Underclocked]

Sounds like it's a POS /forum/smile.gif , but you might try a different IDE cable on it. Also, you might go to Properties on My Computer, Performance, File system, and reduce the cd-rom read ahead. Worth a simple experiment to see if it helps, if it doesn't it will have cost you two restarts.

[krusty]

I can't help you much, but I have had similar problems with a few CD roms lately & they have just been crappy. Replaced them with better brands & the problems disappeared. The crappy ones were LITE ON's. Actually I have never heard anyone say a nice word about them. I tried to trade them in with a local dealer who normally accepts such things & he laughed at me.

Hope this is not your problem, but if you can't solve it you could be in the same boat.

One of the best CD roms available at the moment is an AFREEY 56 speed (or whatever the mid 50's number is). This is especially good if you want to extract digital audio for making MP3s.


Good luck

K