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Austria, Vienna
1 Level
684 Review
30 Karma

Review on πŸ“€ Efficient DVD Movie Writer: HP DC5000 Offers Seamless Recording Experience by Brad Bowers

Revainrating 1 out of 5

ArcSoft is the worst customer support I've ever experienced

I bought this unit from Best Buy when I was new to DVD/Video recording. After everything was installed, I made sure there was 10GB on the hard drive, put the DVD-R in the drive, plugged in the camcorder and that's it - the wizard started moving things around. Since it seemed slow, I turned to other things and checked their progress from time to time. Everything seemed to be working pretty well until – oh, there wasn't anything else on the screen. I have no idea what happened but I just bought a coaster. After some research I found MPEG on my computer which turned out to be a pre-recorded tape. Cool I thought, whatever happens, now I can add chapters, titles, etc. I worked about an hour to create the chapters. It didn't take long for me to become familiar with ShowBiz 2, and it was my first experience with DVD authoring software. I put a photo of my baby in the background, picked a cool theme, custom shots for the chapters, a full nine feet. Hands shaking with excitement, I pressed record. And then the nightmare began. ShowBiz 2 ArcSoft appears to have been shut down by Windows for an "illegal operation". I was using XP Pro on a Pentium M laptop with 2GB of memory. After fooling around for an hour, I managed to burn a DVD after removing all but three chapters. Rebooting, reinstalling etc didn't seem to make a difference - anything over 3 chapters just wasn't being recorded. Since the problem was clearly software related, I contacted ArcSoft Customer Support. Your website, let's start with sux. It took me a while to figure out how to fill out the ticket. Well I finally did and started waiting for an answer. Days passed and nothing came back. I have renewed the ticket several times on their website but have not received a response yet. The 30-day return period was coming to an end. I ended up considering contacting HP directly, although I doubt they would do anything other than send me back to ArcSoft. They reacted in time with a detour. It looks like the problem migrated from the dc3000. But when I tried it, it didn't work either. I told them that the last day I could pick up the DVD was in 2 days. I received the next reply 3 days later. As time was running out, I also sent another request to ArcSoft stating that I have an open request to which I have not received a response. They responded via email and instructed me to respond with details of my issue as they did not have the ticket I submitted in their database. I went to their website and both tickets were there, one after the other. I have replied to the email with this information as stated. Guess what? Email is back to normal. I tried to reply again the next day - same thing. Needless to say I brought the DVD back to the store. Have now Sony bought. It costs $100 more but I doubt it's worth it.

Pros
  • Stylish and modern design
Cons
  • I vaguely remember