Panasonic DVD-ROM drive

Advantages: Good looks, handle, case strength
Disadvantages: Battery life

...floppy, memory etc. The only thing I miss is a tv out jack, but then Panasonic did not make these laptops primarily for watching dvds. Other good points include the very good feel touchpad and a good qualtiy gel mounted 12gb hard drive. The bad points now: the worst I think is the battery life. Since I bought the laptop second hand it came with a battery that held charge only for an hour. Later, I bought a brand new battery which originally held charge for 4-5 hours. However, only 6-7 months later and without much portable use the battery held charge only for 1-1.5 hours. That was rather disappointing considering that new batteries cost anything over £80-£100 to buy. Something else I don't like is the fact that the cd rom and the floppy are not hot swappable. Every time you want to change from one to the other you have to switch off the laptop... Read review

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Advantages: Reliable, works with DVD+and-R/RW and DVD-RAM
Disadvantages: Not compatible with dual-layer disks

...First of all, a note to say that I think the UJ-825 model is being superceeded by the UJ-845 which has support for dual-layer. Still, I hope my experience opening a laptop will be useful to some people like me who dip their toes into opening their computer once the warranty has run out. The original CD-R/RW and DVD-ROM combo drive in my Time brand laptop was beyond repair (having dropped it, I'm not surprised), I decided to see if it is possible to swap it with a functional model and, while at it, upgrade to a DVD writer. My previous drive - a common slot-loading Matshita CW-8121 - is basically a Panasonic as it was built by the Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., who use Panasonic as a retail brand. I get the impression it has been used in various Apple notebooks as well as my three-year-old PC. Replacing a CD/DVD drive... Read review

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Advantages: Gigantic storage capacity, long shelf life for stored disks
Disadvantages: Not cheap, bit slow sometimes.

...) focus a bit more on the drive itself. The main reason you would buy this drive as opposed to the lF-D103 is its capacity. It supports the newer bigger 9.4GB capacity DVD-RAMS. This is a huge amount of storage. Many of you reading this probably have less storage space on your entire computer. Installation was a doddle whack it in an empty bay, connect to my SCSI card and reboot. Everything works first time, Panasonic (and I suppose Microsoft) doing what they ought to. There is one weird anomaly though, since the drive can handle cds and DVD-RAMs it appears in mycomputer twice, once as a cd drive and once as a removable hard drive. Still it does not seem to cause the pc any problems so I must not grumble too much. The drive can also handle ordinary dvds (properly known as DVD-ROMs) and PD (about which I know zip). The software... Read review

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