CD-ROM for the road plays music and MPEG movies too
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): What is the equivalent of using a personal computer without a CD-ROM drive nowadays? Probably the same as having a car without a spare tire. You still can drive it, but if a disaster strikes, you'll start cursing. And, as Murphy's law says, if anything can go wrong, it will.
If you don't have a spare tire, you will have to get help if you get a puncture. Fixing the flat tire will thus take much longer than simply replacing it with the spare. In the same way, reinstalling programs will be so inconvenient if you don't have a CD-ROM drive. It can be done, but it takes much longer and involves much more hassle.
Last week, I created Win 95 Setup diskettes from my Toshiba 100CS, using the included utility. There were 30 diskettes altogether. "My God," I thought, "I really hope I'll never have to reinstall Win 95 on this notebook." Just thinking of the idea of having to swap all 30 diskettes into the hard-to-reach floppy disk drive of the notebook makes me sick. If you've been installing mega software suites -- such as Perfect Office -- using their CD-ROM versions, you'd certainly feel the same way, too.
Fortunately, the prices of CD-ROM drives have come down considerably. Adding one to your machine will not take too big a bite from your wallet. Even when it comes to notebooks, the choice is wide and the prices are more affordable than ever. You can either buy a notebook with a built-in CD-ROM drive for a reasonable price, or you can buy an external one.
As I have stated several times, we don't need a CD-ROM drive for playing CD-I interactive games or watching CD-Video movies. We need one because installing software is easier from a CD-ROM than from heaps of diskettes. We also need one because more and more magazines offer collections of back issues' articles on CD- ROMs. Remember the Windows Magazine CD that I once reviewed in this column? It was just one of them.
Some time ago I reviewed an external drive from Kingston Technologies called Go Anywhere CD-ROM Drive. This double-speed drive used a parallel connection and can only be operated with an AC power adapter. It's sufficient for most requirements, but there are more elegant alternatives.
For example, Panasonic has released a portable CD-ROM drive that connects to your notebook via a SCSI PC Card. Courtesy of Memori Primatama, I was able to test drive this combination of a CD-ROM drive and an audio CD player, and had a lot of fun with this Rp 1 million (US$425) gadget.
Features
Insert six AA-size batteries into the battery compartment of the Panasonic KXL-D740 CD-ROM drive, and you'll have a portable CD player that you can haul around and play independently. Add a pair of earphones or a pair of powered speakers, and you can listen to Vladimir Ashkenazy playing Chopin. The sound quality is not bad at all. And, if you still have some money left after purchasing the drive, you can even buy an optional rechargeable battery from the dealer.
The manual claims that you can enjoy up to four hours of audio using six Alkaline AA batteries, or spin CD-ROMs for up to two hours. With the rechargeable battery, you can have a spinning time of two hours for audio and one hour for data.
This CD-ROM drive has most of the buttons one needs to play audio CDs: Play, Pause, Forward Skip, Reverse Skip, and Stop. There are no Fast Forward and Fast Reverse buttons, but one very seldom uses these functions anyway. There is of course a volume control on the front of the unit, and in case you don't want to accidentally press the Open button you can lock it so you'll be able to enjoy the music without interruption.
The CD-ROM is about 50 percent longer than a typical Discman, but not much taller. At less than 0.5 Kg, it won't add too much weight to your notebook accessories. The design is sleek and the color is pleasing to the eye. An LCD panel is located in the front of the CD well, and it tells you what it is doing.
As a CD-ROM drive, it delivers quad-speed performance. A single speed performance is equal to 150 KB per second. A dual- speed delivers 300 KBps, and a Six-speed 900 KBps. The state-of- the-art is now eight-speed, or 8X. We don't need this level of data transfer performance for playing audio CDs. We need the high speeds when we copy data, install software, or search a database.
Installation
The unit comes complete with a PC Card SCSI connector, a SCSI- 2 cable, a power adapter, and one single installation diskette. The PC Card is Type II, so if you have two slots for Type II or one slot for Type III, you still can have another PC Card added to your notebook. You can, for instance, add an MPEG PC Card, and watch MPEG videos on your notebook.
When I started the notebook with the PC Card already inserted, Win 95 asked for the installation diskette. Installation was no hassle at all. After rebooting, drive D was already part of Win 95 Explorer.
The drive performs very well. I tried installing some software from a CD-ROM, and I was very happy with the performance. Being so used to double-speed Sony CDU-33A CD-ROM drives (I have three of them), I really liked the speed of this quad-speed drive. Searching for keywords in a Windows Magazine CD took much less time compared to the old drives.
When trying to control the drive from the notebook, not all the operation buttons on it will function. For instance, if we use Win 95's CD Player program, we cannot stop playing an audio CD by pressing the Stop button. We have to do it from inside the program. To get these buttons functioning again, we have to open and close the disc cover once. The manual explains this clearly.
You can also use this CD-ROM drive with a desktop machine because this drive uses SCSI connection. All that your desktop PC has to have is a SCSI host adapter. Panasonic recommends Adaptec's AHA 1542C or Future Domain's TMC 1670, but most other ASPI-based SCSI adapters will also work well. If you don't have one already, this adapter will set you back about Rp 500,000. You'll also need to buy an external SCSI cable. Then you can use this CD-ROM drive on your desktop PC as well.
Because it is a SCSI device, you can also configure its SCSI ID number and terminator. The dip switches are located underneath the drive, next to the battery compartment.
The drive also has a power-saving feature. If no instruction is received from the computer for four minutes, it will enter sleep mode. The laser and spindle motor will stop. The same will also happen if you're playing an audio CD and no button is pressed for four minutes after it has finished playing the entire CD. It will restart as soon as you press a button or when it receives a command from the computer.
This CD-ROM drive will not disappoint. However, it doesn't mean that it's completely flawless and nothing could be improved. Most notably, the case doesn't seem to be sturdy enough to withstand abuse. Therefore, I would really advice against taking this CD-ROM drive with you while jogging.
I also wonder why people at Matsushita have not thought of integrating the power supply into the drive. Toshiba has done it with their current generation of notebooks, and I believe there is no major problem in doing the same to portable CD players.
The power switch button is located at the rear of the left side. The button is hard to press. Most of us work on cluttered desks, so the ideal location for the power switch is actually on the front. The LCD display is also a little bit too small and rather hard to read.
But, if you can live with these minor annoyances, this is a great CD-ROM drive to accompany you and your notebook when you travel. And, for those on a stricter budget, Panasonic has a double-speed version too, which costs about Rp 300,000 less.