more David Pogue gossip:

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As soon as I stick a writable DVD drive it says it is a CD drive. Happens with an old DVD drive that works on other computers so I suspect it is the computer not the drive. Specifically since it is a netbook that has no native DVD I suspect there is a missing driver but google is so fucking spammed that a google search won't find the driver for me.

Is the external drive cobbled or a brand name?

Asus which is not a good brand name. But it works on other computers.

And the documentation says there is no custom driver. It is specifically designed to run off the standard USB mass storage driver.

With no DVD in the drive it says that it is a DVD Ram drive. AS soon as a DVD is in the drive XP sees it as a CD drive.

I was just wondering if either the netbook or the drive manufacturer had some extra utils.

Yeah, I'm sure you checked, but I was hoping to have an "Oh! I heard that..." response, but hmmm...

They might but I have yet to get to any ASUS drivers. Keep ending up with sites trying to sell driver dective. Google has been search ended spammed to the point of useless for certain things. You just can't get anything but spam in the first 1000 results. Maybe I'll try bing or yahoo.

Typo, can't you just go to the ASUS website for drivers? When I google "asus" I get their mainpage which has a "drivers" subhead...

Yeah but no driver for this dvd player on the site. At any rate found a solution. I downloadws easyCD free cd burning software and with that installed the drive works even when I'm not running Easy CD. Downloaded something during installation that fixed the problem.

So, I have to go to a conference next week, and realized I no longer have a work laptop. Thinking vaguely about picking up a netbook for the trip. Does anyone have a recommendation? I will mostly use it for net surfing, possibly some word processing. Or should I look into a tablet?

eta: possibly some movie watching, too, but not a lot.

Thoughts?

The word processing means you probably will want to bring along a compatible keyboard. I have never seen a netbook or laptop whose keyboard I'd want to use for even 20 minutes at a time. Also if you are going to do word processing those tiny high resolutions screens which are so wonderful for graphics and OK for briefly reading email and web sites become intolerable. Drew can make the case for the ipad, which gives you a choice of keyboard. These days tablet+keyboard will give great web surfing, and OK word processing when you add the keyboard. Pack the keyboard in your luggage/briefcase and use only for typing intensive stuff. You can use the tablet alone on planes, trains, any time you are doing just about anything but word processing.

Which tablet I'll leave to others. Don't know which have what word processing capabilities. Also do you need to do word processing when not connected to internet? That makes a difference. A lot of tablets don't have native word processing, just let you do wp in cloud (google docs and such) when connected to internet.