BenQ DW1640 - Not All Of Them Work

[cem3396]

Got one early in October. I still don't have one that works.

Warranty requests can be submitted on line, but are ignored. Phone cueue for service is often over an hour long. Replacement units are all re-furbs. Refurbs are worse than the one I started with.

Seems like the exposure with purchasing BenQ products is having a big sink hole of time and effort if the product doesn't work out of the box. Mine didn't.

Hard to recommend BenQ warranty, and hence BenQ products.

[dolphinius_rex]

That's odd...

What's the problem with the burner?

[cem3396]

The reviews said I could write 4,500 MB in about 6:00 (MM:SS).

The first DW1640 would only wirte to 8x DVD-Rs. 3,100 MB took 1:37:00 (HH:MM:SS).

The second DW1640 (refurb warranty replacement) will not even recognize a DVD... blank, or previously written. CDRs fine.

[Dartman]

Well all of my BenQ drives have worked fine including the original 1600, now a 1620 pro. I haven't had to contact custumer service yet and their firmware updates are fast on the new drives. There have been a few lemons out of course but I have 4 and all have performed nicely so far.
You do realise to burn faster then disks rated speed you need to turn on Over Speed disks in qsuite2? If your having that kind of slow speeds could be a bad cable, bad drivers, DMA not on UDMA2, or a bad drive, try it in another machine that you know works with burners properly just to double check.

[dolphinius_rex]

I have 6 BenQ drives ... and although I myself suspected 1 DW1620 and 1 DW1640 to be defective, later testing on other machines showed them to both work fine!

It just dawned on me I have 6 BenQ drives.... wow!

[cem3396]

Thanks for the input. I am conviced that several folks have working BenQ drives. I don't.

Here's a few of the things that have been tried: new cables, evaluated as only unit on cable, latest firmware, latest BIOS, evaluated on three different PC's, plenty of memory (> 1 GB), Win-XP SP2, latest Nero, latest Roxio. Dedicated machine, quiet machine, lots of restarts between trials and setting changes.

43 coasters and counting.

[Dartman]

Damn, you gotta have a black cloud over your Burners at that rate. Try to get them to send you a 1655 and see how that goes. 2 bad ones in a row has to be fairly rare I'd say but obviously not impossible, good luck