Allegedly, on or about 24 August 2013, Martin S sent: > the laptop is only a few months old The laptop is the one with the disc reading problem? It might be just a case of cleaning the reader. Laptop drives are notorious for exposing the laser mechanism to contamination. It takes more effort to get muck into a desktop's drive, as only the tray pops out to the outside world. Being brand new is no guarantee that the device is in excellent working order. When discs work on one device, but not another, it tends to point the finger at the device. It may be faulty, it may be less tolerant of out-of-spec media, the media may just be less compatible, the media may just be plain awful and a really good drive disguised that from you. On that last note, a lot of media is just awful. Since a large number of people just buy the cheapest that they can get, manufacturers are more than happy enough to sell shoddy goods. When I first started working with optical media, I tried a variety out, and quite a lot of it was marginal, a few outright crap, and a few really noticeably good. The quick tests were how long it took the computer to start working with a disc just inserted. Those that spent ages going whiz-whir, trying to read the disc, were obviously crapper than when a disc almost immediately starts doing its job. Longer tests were things like discs that failed in the middle of doing a burn of the whole disc (quite a few would do that). And even longer tests were whether the disc was still use good months, or years, later. Quite a few were not. I'm not going to name and shame, because my tests relate to my equipment, it was a long time ago, and I wouldn't want the repercussions of disgruntled companies. I will do the opposite, Verbatim have been the best discs that I've used, for probably somewhere around a decade of doing CDs or DVDs, I've only had a few random failures, and one spindle of discs that obviously were a bad batch. With a few other brands, I've seen 20-30% failure rates, and people seem willing to accept that, despite how that can be a catastrophic loss of data only discovered too late, rather than it simply being a fail while burning that will be redone on another disc in a few minutes. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64 All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is no point trying to privately email me, I will only read messages posted to the public lists. George Orwell's '1984' was supposed to be a warning against tyranny, not a set of instructions for supposedly democratic governments. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines Have a question? Ask away: http://ask.fedoraproject.org
