Home > Consumer Reviews > Hewlett Packard C4450A CD-Writer Plus M820e for Laptops 4x4x20x

This CD-RW drive is excellent for anyone who has a laptop or a PC with a PC card drive. If you have no room for one of those bulky external CD-RW drives that are as big as the internal ones (with casing), if you don't want to pay near $500 dollars for an external CD-RW drive that is this small and basically does the same things, or if you simply have a leptop that doesn't have a cd-rom drive and want a model that will do everything then this model is the best choice. Hey it's the best choice by far.

From the time the package came to my door to the time I opened it up to the time I got finished setting it up and recording CDs it had been only 15 minutes... The software that comes along with the drive s excellent although I wish that it would have allowed me to convert MP3s to Wav files for recording (you'll need your own MP3 decoder like winamp), but it'll record CD files onto WAVs (which I recommend for CD recording since recording straight from the CD will lead to skipping).

I've heard reviews of other external CD-RW drives that are this compact, have the same speeds (20x read, 4x CD-R and 4x CD-RW) and only one other model (the Pocket Rocket) has had a better review but only for the fact that it comes with a rechargeable battery, but when I looked at its price of $500 I gasped. Paying a sub $400 price for this model is much better than paying $150 more for a model in which the only extra thing is a battery. If youre willing to forgo the battery then this model will be your best bet.

My M820e has functioned well for me. I'm running on Wind-NT 4.0.
My son uses it on his laptop running Wind-98. I bought my
daughter one for her laptop which is running Wind-2000. Note that you have to download a revised driver for Wind-2000 from
the HP web page. Not clear why other reviewer didn't download
a driver for his Wind-2000 o/s. HP web page says this is
required.

A word of caution, make sure you download the windows 2000patch ...

Installing the drivers from the HP CD will cause W2K not to loadagain... (blue stop screen, not even letting to load in safe mode..)

Thankfully Windows 2000 self-repairs, as soon as you put in the W2K install CD.

I don't know if you can attribute the poor quality to the products prior treatment, or if it is the new driver that needs to be installed to run the thing w/ windows 2000, or if the product just (stinks) but I can tell you one thing....I would not buy it again if someone paid me!!!!!!