Sony VRDVC20

to n0v0n: I'm in Hong Kong, not Japan. Hong Kong is a special administrative district of the People's Republic of China, so technically, I'm in China, although Hong Kong is functioning in a kind of legal twilight zone until 2047 when the administrative district expires.

to Kingsora: The email attachment hasn't shown up. Apparently gmail doesn't like attachments. Try these accounts. davgerrold@compuserve.com or dgerrold@pacbell.net. We're not there yet, but I think the light at the end of the tunnel isn't a train.

 

@dgerrold

Apologize for the confusion, I thought it was Japan.

Did U go into the SONY site?

Those are the only drives that they show.

I tried other sources but could not find any drives.

The only other choice is to go out and buy one and make a copy of the CD and turn it back in saying that it didn´t work. 8>)

If you don´t have any other choice let me know.

I will be in Seattle this coming week, but I still will carry my laptop with me.

Let me know

 

I have the whole cd ripped. I could send it all to him, and then could burn himself the cd, but I just can't get it all to him. The files are too big for me to send in an e-mail, and it would take forever over AIM. Do you know of another way I could send/share large files faster?

This would also help me out cause I'm constantly sending my sister music through AIM cause her college has a firewall and she can't download music from a LimeWire, Kazaa, etc. I'd appreciate it.

 

to n0v0n:

I thought about buying a unit, ripping the disc, and returning it, but two things stopped me. First, nobody has the unit in any of the stores I asked. (I was going to just ask if I could copy the disc, that's all.) The second reason why I don't do buy-burn-return is that it's wrong; it's not fair to the seller, it's not his fault, so why should he have to suffer for someone else's error.

to kingsora:

There used to be some service where you could upload a gigabyte of stuff into a temporary file for someone else to download, but I don't remember the name. But I really need only the driver files, nothing else. And it looks like a couple other folks have already sent them to me c/o my other email acct.

Last night I went online and downloaded all the upgrades and patches for my Thinkpad, including a BIOS upgrade and an embedded controller upgrade. Those are installed and working fine. I also installed the firmware upgrade in the VRD-VC20, thanks to the two people who sent me that file. (BTW, the drive is actually a DRU-700A in an external box, that's what the firmware upgrade sees.)

The laptop gave me a different error message than before, so this was some progress. I rebooted and when I clicked on it, XP told me to insert a disc into the unit; there was already a blank disc in it. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to test read or test write anything, but Nero 6 did recognize it and it was able to report on the specifications of the drive, so I'm optimistic that the problem might have been solved. When I get back to my apartment tonight, I'll be able to do further tests and know for sure.

I'll let you know if this solved the problem. Thanks.

 

Okay, here's where I'm at. I can read and write to discs in the VRD-VC20 using Nero 6. (I didn't install the Nero 5 that came with the unit.) So in that regard, everything is fine. It won't read a DVD+R that someone gave me, but neither would anything else, so that seems to be a disc problem.

However, I'm still getting the yellow triangle in the device manager, and I can't click on the drive in explorer to explore it. None of the different drivers that folks sent me would install. The hardware install wizard wouldn't recognize them. But I can use the drive and when I get back to the states, I will be on the phone to Sony customer service....

Thanks, all!

 

Kind of odd. I'd turn my on, and it'd always say, "There is new software for this device" or something. It'd ask me to install some new drivers and I'd say "No" because it was working fine. A week ago or so, I told it to install the drivers that I had ripperd from the cd and tried to send to you. It installed them fine even w/o a disc, and it doesn't ask me anymore if I want to install new stuff. I'd def. give Sony a call and see what's going on.

 

Hi there,
Does anybody have the Firmware update to use the VRD-VC20 as video capture for the PC.
Thanks
Francesco