Burn baby burn! (LG GCR 8523B)

Member Name: seth1970

Product:	LG GCR 8523B
Date:	29/05/09 (16 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A fantastic CD burner that has not let me down yet!

Disadvantages: A bit hard to get hold of these days

Whizz, bang wallop. My CD burner has die. Probrably due to the fact that I am transferring loads of my old albums videos to CD, and it has been going non-stop for the past 2 weeks!

My last CD burner was an LG, and I was more than happy with what it produced. That one cost me £49.99 a couple of years ago, so I was expecting to pay around £30 this time.

I popped into Aria in Levenshulme, and they had some LG burners in the bargain bin. The LG GCE 8523B was in there and caught my eye immediately. The price also shocked me-£4.99!!! I grabbed it, and ran home.

The box contained the drive, am installation cd, cables, and a copy of Nero Smartsuite, that was not advertised on the box. Result!!! This is one of the best bits of software for CD Burners ever made!!!

It is a standard size for this kind of drive, measuring in at 14.6 cm wide, 18.5 cm deep and 4.1 cm tall. The fascia is the usual off-white color that these things seem to come in, and has an eject button, volume wheel, headphone socket and drive light. Nothing new here, but that's not a problem. It claims to be Burnproof (i.e., will not make coasters), and I am please to say, up to now it has lived up to this.


Installing the drive was a bit fiddly, but this is not LG's fault, more the fault of me trying to get as much in a case as possible!!

Windows XP took care of the software installation (Once again, I love XP!!), and I installed Nero.

I first burnt a 70 minute VCD on it at max speed (52x). It took 2 minutes 15 seconds, and it played perfectly. I also burnt an audio disk, and MP3 disc, and a disk of software all at top speed, and all without any problems.

The open/close function is nice and smooth, and the drive it'self was almost silent. These things don't often make much noise anyway, but this one is even better!

The Nero Smartsuite you get with it is an amazing program. The wizards that pop up are extremely useful, and are great for beginners and experts alike.

It does what it says on the box very well, and is highly recommended.

I previously published this review on Ciao under the name sethsurvey. As far as I am aware, I can re-publish it here, but if anyone knows any different, please let me know

Summary: Well worth getting is you are just burning CD's

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