Well, at long last I’ve sorted the old CD writer problem. I can safely say now that (touch wood, fingers crossed, stand on one leg, sell my soul to Satan) I have a CD writer which works. I’m almost scared to even write it, in case it’s tempting fate too much. I mean I bought it on Saturday and it’s worked all weekend but what does that mean? It’s probably just about to break right now. It’s probably got some kind of work-for-two-days-then-brake built in mechanism.

Well anyway having got my money back for the last one I decided to just go out and replace it with something that was nigh on identical but just made by a different company, and it worked. One huge plus point was that while the previous one came with a cut down version of the software (with the rather annoying option to pay £60 for an upgrade) this one comes with a full package and loads of documentation in such a way that you feel almost like they care whether it works when you get it home.

It’s still external and still connects via the new USB2 card I bought which is nice and by all indications it seems to even work fairly fast too. Granted my little computer can’t crank it up to the 40x speed advertised but I managed to get something approaching 15x which is a normal sized CD in just over 4mins - so I’m happy.

The only thing which is still a niggle, and oh so very ironic, is that one part of the software for new CD writer won’t install because it detects I haven’t got rid of the equivalent software from old CD writer. When trying then to un-install the old software I am prompted to put in the CD which I originally installed it from, which of course I took back to the shop with the old CD writer when I took that back. I’ve tried deleting all the files I could find which related to the old software but to no avail. The new software is still detecting it and will not download. It isn’t a huge deal, as it’s a small part of the package and not really one I’d definitely use so much. It’s very annoying though to think that the old CD writer is still spoiling things way after I took it back to the shop.