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Acer CRW 1032A
by Morgenhund
I recently bought a 1032A to install in a system for a friend, as it was on special offer at my local electronics store, where I had a loyalty card. This ten speed burner, which rewrites at quad speed is one of two ten speed burners offered by Acer, the other being the 1832A which just has a faster Rewrite Speed (8 speed as opposed to ... quad speed). It was reduced from ATS 2990 (€217.32 or £140) to ATS 2490 (€180.98 or £115) which grabbed my attention.
I have installed a lot of CD Rewriters in my time and thought that the ACER should be a piece of cake. I was unfortunately wrong. Firstly there was no IDE cable supplied (I know that often you can just plug it into the spare slave position of your primary IDE cable if you don't mind operating a computer with your burner as your only CD Rom drive. After all at 32x maximum read speed this is easily fast enough to cope with reading CD Roms.
Once I had been out to buy an IDE Cable (an extra ATS 60 (ca. £3) I then installed the drive and the drivers and then found the system kept hanging and even stopped recognising the other CD Rom drive. After much fiddling about with various settings I decided that the problem could lie in the fact that either the drivers were incompatible with Win98 first edition, or that perhaps there was a problem with the setup of Windows.
As a precaution I did a full re-install (rather than installing it over the top of an existing installation) of windows and hey presto both drives were recognised and ready to go, once I had installed Nero 5, which was supplied with the package.
The first thing to do was to test the drive, and I plumped for making a 650Mb data disk full of data files, and photos as a test. The drive purred away happily and in a few minutes the CD was burnt. Of course one precaution that must be taken is to check the recommended write speeds of the media you are using, and not to write at a speed higher than recommended - many bla
nks are only 8x write compatible.
Having tested out a wide range of music CDs all seemed to be alright, although it went and threw a wobbly as trying to do drag and drop copying - courtesy of Ahead's InCD software, which of course was included with bundle. The Acer Rewritable Blank that was included had no problems coping with quad speed rewrite, and the drive other than the glitch with drag and drop seems to function very well.
Of course that is if you make sure you have an IDE cable spare, and also that you install it into a fresh installation of Windows otherwise you may encounter a few problems. The instructions for installation were very basic (I usually don't bother because I can fit burners in my sleep with my eyes closed...) with little or no information on trouble shooting and the Nero brochure was heavily truncated from the retail version of the manual. It might be worthwhile getting a shop to fit your burner for you if you are not experienced, otherwise go for an HP burner, as they have the best installation guide.
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