HP 8230e external (HP CD-Writer 8230e)

Member Name: gunneruk

Product:	HP CD-Writer 8230e
Date:	13/10/03 (490 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: nice looking

Disadvantages: hp

I bought this as a gift for my girlfriend, she has an HP laptop. I am a techie and I have much experience with installing things like this. The initial install was problematic, after installing the drivers, the 8230 and the internal laptop cd stopped working. HP tech support tried to get it working but I ended up re-installing Win 2000. That really sucked.

The HP "MyCD" software is not that great. I haven't tried Adaptec yet, but I'm planning on it.

Tried to use the newer 80 min / 700MB CDR media, and all I got were coasters galore! oh well, back to 74 min, no big deal, but that sucks too.

Next, we try to burn an audio CD using MP3's ripped using Real Jbox, and HP doesn't recognize them as being the right quality. So we convert the songs to different formats (WAV), build the track listing, and when we start recording, windows reports that we have unplugged the CD writer. We did no such thing! So then MyCD is crashed, we reboot and it doesn't remember the track listing! We must re-create the entire track list, and then it finally works. I have 4x Yamaha SCSI cd writers at home and at work, and this should have taken 1 hour. Instead it took 4-5 hours just to burn one CD!

I wouldn't recommend this, If you want to seriously burn CDs get a regular burner using IDE or SCSI. If you need portability or laptop compatibility, then look into pc card burners, or firewire.. explore all of your options. Overall this hasn't been a pleasant product to work/play with.

Summary: