Well on friday I recieved the new shiny DRX-710UL. 9 discs I've written with this player. 9 discs have random skips when played on a standalone player - and the dvds lock up my pc when played on the sony drive. It also never burns faster than 3.0x. I've tried new firmware, friends computers, firewire, usb and 4 brands of disc including TDK and verbatim. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. I used to have the drx-500ul and it was flawless

Tomorrow morning it goes back to Sony for my £150 back. Hisssss!

£150 ! scan.co.uk have it for £116...

That is one expensive external enclosure as well, the internal version goes for £56

well... it came with 5 dual layer discs.

Does the burner need to be external? If not I would take a look at NEC's burners. Many people have had good thing to say about them.

Can I ask you if you used the same software on all those computers? I'm sorry, but all Ulead software is complete sh**, as you say. Besides, I'm using the 710a, which I would assume is the exact same drive only internal, and I'm not having any problems.

Anyway, since you never responded and said whether you tried it or not, I'd suggest the easy, inexpensive route, and just download a demo of Nero.

It looks like that thing has both USB 2.0 and Firewire ports. Have you tried the USB ports? I say this because I had a friend with and external firewire case that used a chipset that didn't jive with the firewire card in his PC.

It looks like he said he's tried firewire and USB. The only thing he didn't say he tried was other software.

Yes, he did. It would help to read and take-in the complete original post before replying to it.

Yes, he did. It would help to read and take-in the complete original post before replying to it.

And it would also help to re-read the original post before making such a comment to someone. What Philip said he did try was new firmware, but there was no mention of which cd writing applications were used in all of the attempts. Or at least, not in this thread.

Actually, I was thinking the same thing at first, but judging by the ever handy emoticon, I think he was responding to my first sentence and not my second

I believe he's actually talking to himself there.

I was agreeing with Dignan about Philip trying both firewire and USB. I then publicly scolded myself.

LOL. Software wise I tried Nero 6 which bundled with the recorder, Tmpgenc DVD Author, and 2 Ulead products.

Well, that sure answers my question. I was very pleased to see that Nero 6 was included with the drive.

Anyway, the only other thing I could think of is that if it's easy enough and doesn't violate your warranty, you could try taking the actual drive out of the external enclosure and hooking it up via IDE. Or you could just return it, buy the internal version, and try it out with an external enclosure of your choice. I've been thinking about doing that myself.