HP 8250i difference

[De Joker]

A friend and i both have the HP 8250i CD writer. They were bought 2 months apart at different stores. Both were made in feb. 2000, only mine is from hungary and his is from malaysia.

The strange thing is, besides the fact that the look different they also operate different. Mine has a front cover that open's up before the cd tray slides out while his doesn't have that because the cd tray and front are one piece.

That's not all, his is detected at boot-up and in windows as a hp cd writer 8200a plus series while mine is just plain cd/r/rw. Also his is detected as UDMA 33 while mine is just PIO 4.

There's more, audio catalyst detects his maximum cd read speed at 32x while mine is 24x.

How is this possible since they are both the same model made in the same month.

[Mntsnow]

Hmm...Maybe they have different firmware versions???

[tonym]

Mntsnow,

You are correct!

The two have different firmware versions. And it looks like HP offered two different drives as the HP8250i !!

De Joker:

Take a look here:
http://www.hp.com/cposupport/information_storage/support_doc/lpg40231.html

This will answer any questions that you might have in identifying the unit.

I can't account for why the two devices show different speeds (24x vs. 32x), but this may be a question you want to take up with HP Service or Support!

Good luck...


Tony

[De Joker]

Thanks guys, and Tony i just checked out the link you posted and it seems that i have the C4464A and he has the C4464B, but other than the outside differences the don't mention anything about other differences or similarities. I suppose the B version is a newer revision of the A version.

[JRcomputers2]

This is nothing to do with HP but I use to work for Apple and when we were slow we would update boards from around the world. They also gave us the option when we bought A system to get one of the manufacturing lines we chose. So no surprise is what I'm getting at. Manufacturing is manufacturing!

[De Joker]

I guess this link explains why the speeds are detected differently. http://www.cdrinfo.com/tips/hardware_oc.shtml
It seems the C4464B is realy a HP 9100 instead of the HP8250i. I should be so "lucky" to get the C4464A instead of the C4464B.