DVD/CD-RW Combo: One Drive Does It All

Consider it a minor optical-media miracle: Ricoh has paired 6X/4X/24X CD-Rewritable technology with 4X DVD-ROM capabilities in the same drive. The MP9060a ($399 list; $375 street) is an enticing upgrade option; before now, you needed separate drives to watch DVD movies and to burn audio or data CDs. And the drive largely lives up to its promise: Except for a glitch with the bundled DVD movie player, the drive easily passed muster, though it's not the fastest at CD-RW or DVD operations.

Software Snafu

The physical setup of the MP9060a on our Micron 400-MHz Celeron test system went as smoothly as that of any internal ATAPI drive; the unit was set as the master drive on our secondary IDE channel. The installation of the drive's bundled software was another story. While Adaptec's Easy CD Creator 4.0 and DirectCD 3.0 software presented no challenge, and both programs performed without a hitch, the Ravisent CineMaster Software DVD player proved problematic.

CineMaster installed easily enough--after we recovered the serial number and password from the cellophane CD wrapper we'd misguidedly tossed aside. Unfortunately, every attempt we made to play DVD movies using the CineMaster player resulted in a program lockup. Ricoh says it is aware that the CineMaster software seems to conflict with some system configurations. Since we could find neither an upgrade for CineMaster nor a new driver for our test system's NVidia RIVA 128 graphics chip, we installed our own copy of Cyberlink's PowerDVD 2.5, which appeared to take care of the problem. PowerDVD let the MP9060a play movies smoothly, with no dropped frames or hesitation between chapters.