So I made the mistake in trying to upgrade my computer yesterday, yes, should have learned, but I never do.

I went out and bought a DVD writer, an LG 16X Super Multi DVD/CD Rewriter (why do they need the super, ugh), and put it in the computer… restart….. windows has detected signigicant change in your computer hardware and must reauthenticate within 3 days. (changing one component is significant?)

So I was going to phone in the code like I did when I first bought the thing, except, where the code was supposed to be, nothing…. the screen had all the info on it, but it seems it forgot to display the code I needed to phone in. Contacting customer support helped nothing, as they hadn’t seen this problem before, and upper support claimed the computer, given it’s serial number, was supposed to be running 64bit windows which was impossible and what the hell are Staples, Proteva and Synergio respectively. That got us nowhere.

Finally, rebooting the computer seemed to fix it. I’m sick of that, no reason for it to fail, but it did…. fine, phoned in the code, authenticated windows again, and vowed to pirate ever after.

Not that any of this helped though, the DVD writer doesn’t quite work. I’ve got that drive, and also a simple DVD ROM drive not 2 years old in it, but when trying to copy a DVD disc to disc (even a DVD I had just burned myself with some test files on it) it would immediately crap out saying it couldn’t be done, but of course, gave no reason. This is in Nero Express, came with the drive.

Couldn’t even make an image from a DVD that sits in the old drive, had to move it to the writer drive to even save an image to the hard drive…. so I took some DVD my father wanted copied, a memorial movie about a company he was involved with, it had been burned too, so I figured there shouldn’t be any problem. After burning 2 copies of it via the image-to-harddisk method, here are the results.

My Computer’s DVD software:
Original Disc – Freezes and crashes DVD software when accessing some menus
Burned Disc – same thing in the same places

My parents’ new standalone DVD player:
Original Disc – Plays fine
Burned Disc – Says the disc is incompatible with the player, even though the manual says it can play virtually every format, including and explicitly the one I used.

My brother’s old standalone DVD player:
Original Disc – Plays fine
Burned Disc – plays for a while, craps out in some places, turning the player off.

That’s some consistency. I should have stopped when I was ahead (merely wanting a DVD writer, rather than having one, and wanting to tear my hair out)

At least writing simple files to the damn thing seems to work, so I can finally shift some crap off my computer, gig’s and gig’s of star trek. god I’m lame.