DRW-24B3LT DVDrwlightscribe 16X Sata E-green E-hammer Ots W7

By 

R. Harry –

  

Full disclosure: I bought an OEM from a uncommon vendor. It is possible that the retail version with the accompanying firmware update is completely uncommon from my experience.

I had problems with this driving hanging while playing DVDs using multiple software suites. It seems to have worked itself out a bit. It may have been a twisted SATA cable. Anyway, I was getting better playback from 408p youtube videos through PowerDVD. ASUS help was unhelpful and even a small rude. They also make it intentionally hard to even get to their customer service contact information – always a terrible sign. The customer service provider claimed that he had no access to their firmware updates. Odd that they wouldn’t be able to get a hold of firmware for the products they make. I have an ASUs graphics card I was very pleased with so I was banking on the before positive experience. Nothing turns me off more to a company than terrible customer service and blatantly not supporting their products. If you can’t back up the products you make, what excellent are you?

I will be recieving the accompanying disk from my vendor with in a week or so and will test this again and report back. The before version of this drive the DRW-23B1LT was a very well loved and reliable drive. I am hoping that this one will get better as they fix glitches in the firmware.

In the end, I can’t stand working with companies with poor customer service. ASUS typically makes high quality products with no issues. It seems when you do have issues, they don’t care so much about helping you out. In the future I will be avoiding ASUS products that don’t have a long track record. I would also suggest buying from a vendor that will give you the user help (or a excellent return plot) that ASUS refuses to grant themselves.

Update: Finally received the accompanying CD with this from my vendor and I am left with even more mixed feelings/disappointment – not necessarily with this drive but the general market for optical drives by and large. Anyway, I figured out a few things with I got the CD. 1) the Firmware updater does nothing except link you to the ASUS website – completely useless. ASUS has not yet updated the firmware for this product. On the “plus side” I figured out that the E-Hammer software that is supposed to come with this drive is available online (for those that buy an OEM). E-Hammer is apparently only a 32-bit program so for those of us using 64-bit OS, select the Vista 32-bit and you should get the downlaod from there. No thought why they don’t just link it everywhere and no thought why you can’t select Windows 7 for their products. Oh well.

Other thoughts: In the end, this is probably one of the best drives for the cash. I really did go out and pick up a Lite-On with the exact same specs and the playback was just as terrible/excellent and it was like 5 times as loud. I sorta figured out that my largest problem was using PowerDVD 10. It is remarkable to me how a company can make products that are really worse than products that they previously released. PowerDVD 8 and 9 upconvert DVDs much better than the PowerDVD 10 I was using. But that is a whole uncommon review…

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