Plextor 716A DVD burner

With the failed CDs keep piling up, finally I am fed up with the degrading performance of both of my CD burners. File archiving becomes ever more important to me with my routine BitTorrent downloads. I decided to pursue a DVD burner. At the beginning, I was surprised to find out that a 16x Sony DWD22A only cost in the low 50s. As I read more user opinion on the web, I concluded Plextor 716A would be the best in the current market and I got an OEM version from newegg.com. I'd like to pay attention to the details this time to avoid piling up failed DVDs, so I spent time reading the manual and found out my 40 conductor IDE cables have been outdated. Then I went on to replace them with 80 conductor IDE cables for both my hard drive and the new acquired DVD drive. I also got a bundle of 25 8x TDK DVD-R from BestBuy for only $9.99 (basically no matter which brand you choose they are all made in Taiwan). Last night I finally used Nero to fire up this baby. The DVD-R was burned quietly at 8x without any problem. I am looking forward to breaking speed record if I have faster disks. This drive can burn CD-R at 48x. I have never achieved 16x with my previous HP CD burner although it is advertised at 16x.

Google Maps

I searched computer hardware stores in my home town area and found Google Map and Driving Direction quite impressive. I also spent a little time checking out Yahoo Map and MapQuest. Compared to the other two offerings, Google Map provides the largest map viewing area and keeps the rest of page very clean as opposed to getting cluttered with ads. Google Map also interacts very well with the users by showing neat popups when the turn of driving direction is clicked. Panning around the map is very smooth by dragging it with the mouse. At the right bottom corner, it states that the data is from NAVTEQ, which is also used by the other two map offerings. So everyone uses the same source, it is just a matter of coming up with the best user interface and Google does it brilliantly.