By chance, my CD-Writer died at the same time as I was looking to upgrade to DVD, and the MP9060 appeared to offer everything I needed in one drive which, at the time, seemed too good to be true.
Installing the unit was as easy as ever, simply remove the old drive and screw the new one in place. I bought the OEM box as soon in the first month of release and got a very early version, but everything worked straight out of the box, without a single problem.
Unless you have hardware DVD capabilities on your graphics card, you will probably have to buy a seperate MPEG2 Decoder card. I have a Voodoo3 3000 AGP which, while it includes "Software Assistance", is very little use at all. In the end I picked up a cheap 2nd-user card from eBay.
Obviously, this being the OEM box, I had no software at all, and so spent a few hours looking at compatible software. For DVD I use PowerDVD which not only plays films without problems, but will also handle region changes if you should require them. That is, if you wish to play a Region 1 (US) film, you must change the region of your drive.
It is worth noting that the MP9060 only allows 4 region changes before it becomes permanently locked. If the last change you make is to Region 1, then you will only be able to play Region 1 (and Region-Free) discs from that point. Thankfully, some enterprising sould has produced a modified firmware update for the drive which allows you to change the region as often as you like, effectively making it a region-free drive.
DVD playback is as flawless as any standalone hardware player I have ever seen, and the improved picture quality offered by a computer monitor makes for wonderful viewing. It's worth hiring Gladiator just to see the Arena scenes as clear as they were at the cinema. Fantastic.
The drive is also a CD-ReWriter, and one of the best I have ever seen. It will write most CDs at 6x without problems - although some cheaper unbranded discs can only be written at 4x - and ReWriting functionality too. in the 6 months I've had the drive, I have had maybe three failed discs, and those were cheap, scruffy ones.
The drive is supported by all the leading writer software: I use CDrWin and Nero, but many others support it too. The only problem I have found is with CloneCD - if you upgrade to the modified firmware, the drive is no longer recognised by that program.
The drive is an IDE unit, so usual warnings about IDE and low-power machines apply. This unit would be almost unusable on a P166, but any Athlon CPU you care to try it on should handle it without problems. A SCSI version may be available by now, which should be even faster and more reliable.
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A great review and it is your first submission to. Quality reviews like this and ones in popular categories like computers often get a high number of reads.
Jan 3rd, 2001
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