Hello! Here's a real newbie question. I would feel silly even asking it if I hadn't already gotten about 15 different answers from people who claim to know these things. I bought a pack of dvd+r 8x disks. My dvd burner is 4x. The burner came with my dell inspiron 8600, and the drive is a NEC ND-5100A. The pack of disks says you must upgrade your firmware if you have a 4x burner to be able to use 8x disks. I have looked all over various sites including the dell support site (utterly unhelpful), the NEC site (didn't list my model), and this site (http://tdb.rpc1.org/) which was over my head. I know this firmware upgrade won't allow me to burn at 8x, just to burn at 4x on an 8x disk. I'm burning with Nero, which allows me to set the burn speed. Will it work for me to just tell Nero to burn at 4x, or will it get all confused about having an 8x disk? I'd like to know before opening the pack of disks and eliminating any chance of getting my money back by returning them if they're incompatible. Thank you!
Don't worry. If you checked your support acct for your machine at dell and they didn't list a firmware upgrade, then you should be trouble free. I checked mine and had one on my DVD ROM drive. They're pretty good about listing the updates for a system. You didn't name the brand media being used. Most of the name brands will work okay. The only firmware I noticed for your drive is to make it capable of burning -R media as well. I don't know about this, but it would have nothing to do with your stock of +R media. You can check this link if you're interested. http://tdb.rpc1.org/#ND5100A
I would also highly recommend you never burn at over 4x anyway. The faster the burn the more chance for errors. And for games never burn at over 1x. I have solved a lot of people's problems by just slowing their burn down. it's not worth the 5-7 minutes you save, not to mention the media is cheaper.
Thanks to both of you for good advice. I tried the disks after reading this, and it seems to have worked just fine. Well, I learned a lot about different formats along the way. thanks again!
Nice things to know, and knowing the only reason you need a faster drive is for data and newer only for the newer dual layer media. With the 4X burner you have, you don't have to worry about going too fast on the dvd movies. You're welcome to.
