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Review: Plextor PlexTools Version: v1.15a Reviewer: G@M3FR3@K Provided by: Plextor Europe |
This time we're not going to do
another review but we're going to take a look at a software package called
PlexTools. This software is
delivered with the European Plextor drives and was specially designed to get the
maximum performance out of your Plextor drive. You can use PlexTools for
instance to get more information on your drive, tweak its settings and besides
that you can use it to play audio discs (with support for CD-Text) and of course
you can use PlexTools to copy CD's or to make your own audio compilations
with.
In this small review we're
going to take a look at the latest PlexTools version that is scheduled to be
shipped with Plextor's latest recorders, the PX-W4824A and PX-W4824TU (USB 2.0 drive will be shipped with PlexTools v1.16)
drives. PlexTools v1.15a, just like the drives itself, are not available yet but
Plextor Europe was kind enough to already send us this new PlexTools version and allow us to test its new features and especially its new DAE Error Recovery feature.
Introduction:
In the early Plextor days when
you bought a Plextor drive you would get the Plextor Manager software with your drive. It didn't matter if you bought
your drive in Europe, America or where ever since all drives were shipped with
the same software. Plextor Europe also delivered the Plextor Manager software
with their drives. Perhaps it was time to start making their own software and
that's exactly what Plextor Europe did. PlexTools was born!
Test Machine:
For the tests we'll be using
the following configuration:
Hardware:
- Motherboard: ASUS K7V
- Processor: AMD Athlon 700Mhz
- RAM: 256MB (PC133)
- GFX: ASUS V8200 (GeForce 3 Ti200)
- Hard Disk: Maxtor 30GB 7200rpm (UDMA66)
- IDE Controller: PCI UDMA100 Controller
- USB Controller: NEC USB 2.0 Controller
System set-up:
As you can see we have three
Plextor drives hooked up to our computer: the Plextor PX-W4012A, the PX-W4012TU and the PleXCombo PX-320A. For the PlexTools review we'll be using all three drives.
The Windows XP Professional operating system is installed on our test
machine.
On the
next page we'll take a look at "look & feel" of the PlexTools
software...
