Today turns from hot to ever so very horribly humid. Not nice.
New toy to play with today, a NetMD minidisc walkman. The idea being that you can transfer music from your PC at slightly faster than realtime, which is a very handy thing. The walkman itself is lovely and small and light, and the battery life is now a lot longer (30hours compared with the 3-4 I got with my old one). So back home plugged in and running and it works fine. I’ve read a lot of bad things about the software that ships with these NetMDs (Which is called OpenMG). The two problems are one of stability and the other of control. The first problem seems to be that the software crashes a lot, that’s not very good. The second though is a more fundamental technology problem. The OpenMG software locks the media files you choose to copy to it. It then uses a checkin-checkout system, to ensure you only have a file checked out a maximum of 3 times. This is a bit restrictive. What’s worse though is that once the track is on your minidisc, there’s practically nothing you can do with it, you can’t delete it, split it and so on.
So far I’ve not used the OpenMG software, instead I’ve stuck with something called SimpleBurner, which ships with NetMDs in the US. This simply copies audio CDs to the MD, and a very fine job it does too. The copy speed is great, and the fact it’ll label and group CDs is great.
That said I’ve found since installing this stuff my computer’s been pretty unstable, crashing and locking up quite nicely. And we’re talking serious lockups here, no BSOD, just complete lockup.
So I uninstall all the drivers and software to see if that helps. It doesn’t. I turn the PC off, as at the moment it locks up before screen savers and the like kick in. I’ll try and sort it tomorrow.

Posted by Phil on July 30, 2002 12:00 PM | Categories: Misc