Maxell 16x DVD recordable media review
Posted February 26, 2008 
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Maxell is a well known media manufacturer that has been in the business for decades. They used to ship media of their own using Maxell’s media indetifiers (MID), but recently the manufacturer of their media has varied a lot. We tested their current 16x DVD recordable offering for both, DVD-R and DVD+R. The DVD-R discs are manufactured by RITEK and seem to deliver pretty nice quality, but the DVD+R by RICOH is somewhat disappointing. All the results are uploaded to MediaBase, but read on for some further discussion.
Toshiba made the announcement that they will ramp down the HD DVD format, so the so called war in between the HD DVD and Blu-ray is finally and officially over. Supporters of the HD DVD format are naturally disappointed, but in general this is good news for the consumers. Now nobody has to speculate which format to choose, and the whole industry, including vendors and content producers, can focus on Blu-ray. This should result in improved selection of movies and hardware on the market. They wasted quite a bit of time battling against, which has slowed down the adobtion of the high definition video, so obviously their next target is to push Blu-ray into mainstream format.
Viruses have not made the headline recently. While the Internet is the main medium for the viruses to spread, the network enables the antidote to spread rapidly as well. Anti-virus software can update their virus definitions online, which has made large scale computer virus epidemics rather rare these days. Many new PCs feature an anti-virus software as a standard feature, but unfortunately the PC packages are often shipped with a limited trial offer - most common seems to be a 60 day license of the Norton Internet Security. What to do when the license runs out? Well, don’t worry as there are some high quality anti-virus solutions offered for free.
Premium optical drive vendor Plextor has released an interesting combo drive. Their new PX-300SA is a 16x speed DVD recorder which can also read Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs. The drive is a major technological break through, as it is first of it’s kind on the market, but it remains to be seen how much there is real demand for this combination. The HD DVD is most likely to be extinct, so it is questionable how much is the dual format support worth. Of course, if you are one of those that have already bought a Toshiba or Xbox HD DVD add-on and some titles, the new Plextor could be a nice choice for bringing your PC to the blue laser age and you also provide one with Blu-ray support if and when HD DVD starts fading away.
Stability is very often used as a marketing factor for Linux, or considered as something that gives Linux some edge over Microsoft Windows systems. As usual in Linux vs. Windows debates, many overstatements are made, and some people seem to think that Windows does nothing but crashes and prints out blue screened error messages. In reality there are many sides to this story, and the answer is far from obvious. So here we go mythbusting Linux part II: Linux is more stable than Windows.
