Two weeks ago, I bought a nice Sony Vaio FSN-360 to take with me to DLWS. A laptop is required, mine at work was being traded to the minor leagues in favor of a desktop machine, so I needed to get something. The Sony was a beauty, using a Centrino chipset, but missing a built-in card reader. “Was” is the operative part of that sentence.

After loading Photoshop CS, I found it wasn’t quite as fast as I wanted, and noticed that Best Buy was having a nice sale on a Gateway 7510GX based on a 2.4Ghz AMD Mobile Athlon 64 processor, along with 1Gb RAM, 100Gb HDD, etc. Nice playpretty. So today, the Sony was exchanged for the Gateway. And that has been good and bad.

Look at the timestamp on this posting. I’ve been working for almost six hours (off and on, but mostly on) to get DVD burning to work correctly on the machine. It’s was preinstalled with Nero, and I’m reading various things about how reliable the Nero burning software may (or may not) be for data validation after a burn. I’ve loaded a piece of code called CDCheck, and it’s seeing problems too, but the files that it’s seeing them in, it’s saying are 99% correct. Of course, one bad byte can make the difference between success and failure, so I’m inclined to trust that. However, another test using CDCheck reports that the files on the DVD are very readable, and are correct beginning to end.

I’m confused!

I’ve uninstalled Norton (another culprit for this problem based on some pages on the wild, wild internet), MacAfee, and a whole bunch of other preloaded stuff, to try to ensure that I’m not running into some kind of weird software conflict. I’ve tried two different kinds of DVD media, one +R and one -R. I’ve loaded a new ASPI driver taking me to 2.0.1.74. I have an update for Nero that took me from 6.3.1.11 to 6.3.1.25. Those steps didn’t buy me much. I’ll try a reload overnight from the recovery partition (since I couldn’t burn a recovery disc) and see what happens.

The shame is that I really like this box. It’s beefy, speedy, and not too bulky.