Do you want to upgrade?

My last DVD drive is dead. Kind of. It works. It doesn't work. It reads a data DVD, but not an audio CD. It refuses to burn CDs or DVDs. Sigh.

Fine, I buy a new DVD drive. This time a "retail", not a bulk version (and a different vendor). One with lightscribe and OEM software. Nero OEM. How very nice of Samsung to include that in the box (and not so nice to include a "normal" IDE cable instead of a UDMA133 cable).

So what does this new Samsung drive do in my computer:
1. I still can't grab sudio CDs, neither in iTunes or in any other application.
2. I still can't burn DVDs from the Explorer.
3. While I can burn CDs from Explorer and NERO, I can't burn them critters from iTunes.

But I digress, I was talking about NERO.

So I have a nice and free OEM version of NERO. Let's summarize:
1. I can't write LightScribe. The old version of the NERO software used to crash my computer. No bluescreen, no message in the eventlog. Just a restart. Fuck. I upgraded to a newer version and the new version just fails with a vanilla error message.
2. I can't burn DVDs in NERO. I can start it, but it fails after some time.
3. I installed NERO and the Samsung drive on a different computer, alas, only to get different error messages. (Well I managed to burn my first LightScribe on that different computer)
4. Whenever burning something in NERO fails (and it may fail because NERO *thinks* there is something on a RW disc and is unable to delete it), I HAVE TO CLICK 5 TIMES, SAVE THE PROJECT, CLOSE THE PROGRAM AND OPEN THE PROJECT AGAIN. WTF?


So if the NERO website asks me if I want to upgrade my OEM version and get something decent, I can say: YES!