Review on 🖥️ Hewlett Packard C4505A 8230e: High-performance USB CD-Writer for External Use by Roman Palmer

Bought as a gift for a girl who has an HP laptop. I'm a techie and have a lot of experience installing things like this. The initial installation was problematic after the 8230 drivers were installed and the laptop's internal CD stopped working. HP tech support tried to get it to work but I ended up reinstalling Win 2000. It really sucks. The HP "MyCD" software is not that good. Haven't tried Adaptec yet, but plan to. I tried using newer 80min/700mb CDR media and all I got was coasters galore! well, back to 74 minutes, no big deal but that sucks too. Then we try to burn an audio CD with MP3s ripped with Real Jbox and HP doesn't recognize it as the right quality. So we convert songs to different formats (WAV), create a list of tracks and when we start recording, Windows tells us that we have disabled the CD burner. We didn't do anything like that! So MyCD crashes, we reboot and it doesn't remember the tracklist! We need to recreate the whole tracklist and then it will finally work. I have 4 Yamaha SCSI CD burners at home and work and this should have taken 1 hour. Instead, it took 4-5 hours to burn a CD! I would not recommend that. If you are serious about burning CDs, get a standard IDE or SCSI burner. If you're looking for portability or laptop compatibility, consider PC or FireWire recorders. explore all your options. Overall, this was not a pleasant work/play product.