I have been selling media for some time now which is stored on a hard drive. I was using Western Digital’s Passport serie hard drives because they are small, look nice and i never had problems with them. This week (6 oct 09) i bought another drive. It was the latest model (500 GB, model WDBAAA500AWT-EESN).

When i plugged it in (windows) for the first time two screens popped up. One screen was the “cannot find a driver” -screen. And they other was the “Smartware screen”. And in the windows explorer screen 2! new devices were installed. The hard drive itself and a new CD drive…???. After some digging around i found out that this “Smartware” automatically installs the CD drive everytime! you plug it into your computer. And it is NOT REMOVABLE!!! Shame on you Western Digital

So since i cant remove this annoying smartware i cannot use the drive… Thanks WD….. Goodbye WD…

So be warned and buy the older models!!!!!

Read some more :

• http://superuser.com/questions/44318/how-do-i-remove-a-mybooks-wd-smartware-virtual-cd-from-my-desktop
• http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10351853

I recently bought the Zoom H2 recorder. We reviewed the Zoom H2 earlier, but now that i have some practical experience i wanted to share it with you.

Here are some of my experiences:

1) USB connection

When you plug the USB cable into the Zoom when it is not switched On then something funny happens.

First windows recognizes it, but than later will say that this hardware is not working properly. Switching on the Zoom will not help at this moment.

So you need to switch the zoom off and take the USB cable out. Then turn the Zoom On and go into the menu. Find the USB menu item and choose “Storage”. Then you can connect the USB cable and windows will recognize the Zoom properly.

2) Copying files to/from the Zoom

When you want to copy files from the Zoom then remember this is slooooow. It still uses a USB 1.0 connection… Saving money here SamsonTech ???

3) Responsiveness of the machine

I found that switching between menus and tracks can be painfully slow. Also starting recording and stopping is also quite slow. I am comparing it against the Edirol R09 and the edirol seems much more quicker in responding to the buttons.

4) Recording quality

Although this is very user interpretable i found that the microphones are less noisy then the Edirol R09. I dont know if the noise issue was resolved in the new Edirol R09HR. I will report on that when i have worked with this new gadget.

Concluding i can say that you certainly get what you pay for. The Zoom H2 can be found for around $120-150. The new Edirol start from $330. But the Edirol comes of course with a nice remote control, slicker design and overall more responsive user experience. So the Edirol stays my favorite, but if you are on a budget and dont mind the shortcomings the Zoom is an excellent choice.

I recently received a collection of ebooks that can be used on your PPC Phone.
You can download all the books here (73mb)

We will post later an instruction how to put them on your phone. But if you have experience how to do it, please send it to us. Write a post to me. (You need to have an account.)

[16 jun] We got a nice comment by Indulekha. Read below