Re: DVD writer about to die???

On Tue, 10 Jan 2006 12:44:51 +0000, Robert Sneddon
<nojay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>Bill wrote:
>>> My NEC 3500AG which is now about 15 months old seems to be taking longer and
>>> longer to burn discs as well as giving the odd coaster now and then
>
> It probably is the laser module dying on you. They're not repairable at
>any economic price. You can stretch its lifespan by recording at slower
>speeds and it should continue to work as a reader pretty much
>indefinitely.

Not necessarily - I just had to fix the reader in one one of my Sun
boxes, by opening it up and twiddling the laser power gain trimming
pot by a sixteenth of a turn or so (they're usually near the laser
head somewhere)

Made the difference between being able to read CDR's and not, which
made a big difference in my ability to install a new OS on that box!

Very much a method of last resort. That was a drive built in 1998, and
only replacable with another SCSI Sun compatible one, so it was worth
doing.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 'Epistles' (88,45)
.