CompuServe Messages

Charles, There is no UPGRADE plan offered by NEC but there is an EXCHANGE program you can partake in although its fairly expensive. For $249 you can send your entire drive back to NEC (including cables, manuals, terminator, etc…) and they will send you a brand new CDR-74-1 if you want its features. Its a high price and I doubt they will get alot of takers. The exchange price is almost 50% of a new drive. SCSI-2 does not buy you much at best (things like software volume control) on a CD ROM and I don't know what tangible effect the larger buffer size will show. You might be better off selling your old drive and buying a new one with the money you make. There are some new drives that have equaled or bypassed the NEC now from other vendors for the same or less money. If you need Multisession XA (Photo CD) support maybe an exchange is worth while. Your current drive should handle single session Photo CDs without problems asumming your software drivers support the funtion. If you have trouble reading a single session Photo CD be aware that some early CDR-74 drives (like mine) had bad memory chips which caused image display problems. NEC DOES have an UPGRADE program (for free) in these cases to replace the bad memory chip but you will get the exact same drive returned. I had to send my drive to have this problem corrected. I don't have a PAS sound card so I leave it for someone else to jump in and say for sure whether it has an ASPI manager. My gut feeling is that it does not as ASPI is usually found with a dedicated SCSI controller. If you cannot add other devices to your SCSI chain then I doubt its ASPI based either. You can have SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 devices on the same SCSI chain so even if you add a dedicated SCSI controller later and buy other SCSI-2 devices you can still use your current drive. Let me know if you need further information on Upgrade or Exchange details. Jay Cahow Cahow Consulting