DVD-RW eMac

I see two possibilities here:

1) It could be that the optical drive on your eMac might have been dodgy, and Apple had a surplus of DVD-RW drives. It would be cheaper for Apple to 'upgrade' your dodgy drive to a DVD-RW than to obtain a replacement stock drive in this situation.

2) The optical drive could be erroniously reporting itself as a DVD-RW drive.

I'd get a DVD-R and try to burn it, and see where that leaves you.

Cheers,

The Czar

Are the rest of the specs on the system you received the same as the ones on the system you sent? Are the serial numbers the same? Apple might have just swapped your hard drive from your old eMac into a new one to save time.

Now you mention the Serial number there was something I noticed. On the CD tray flap my Serial is given as: SVM3230LFNL2, Wheras on the System Profiler it is written as "SVM3230LNLZ", which, though similar, are by no means the same. I have never had a DVD-RW in my possesion, but write DVD-R discs perfectly.
One other problem that might be related is the fact the, no matter what speed discs I buy, the mac refuses to burn them faster than 16x. Any suggestions?

That particular drive can only burn CDs at 16X.

Neither of those serial numbers is valid.

You mean they are wrong? I cannot show my cd flap as my camera is broken, but here is a picture of the system profiler:

The CD speed is annoying, as when I bought my eMac it advertised 48x burning.

Interesting, Apple's GSX reports that one as invalid. What serial comes up in the About This Mac dialog?

That's the only place I can find my serial on the Mac, in "About this mac" and then clicking on "System Profiler", as you see in the pic. It is running 10.3.9

In About This Mac, click the part that says Version 10.3.9(or similar) twice, and it shows the serial number.

The serial number there is the same as the one in the system profiler. The build is 7W98.

Though, that serial number does NOT follow the serial number conventions. 2 digits alpha(plant id), then 3 digits numeric (year and week made). ex. UV1294DELAN . This is the serial number for an iBook I had a while back. the three digits alpha is what is throwing that unit off. Was the repair done by an Apple service depot, an Apple dealer/service center, or a third party (compusa *shudders*)?

- iantm

That iBook of yours shipped with 128MB of RAM AND a copy of OS X 10.0.... now THAT would be interesting!

Yeah, that's because when you bought your eMac it had a Combo drive, which can burn at 48x. The SuperDrive you have now can only burn CD-Rs at 16x. If you had bought an eMac with a SuperDrive, it would have been advertised as only burning CDs at 16x.

If you really don't like the CD burning speed, take the machine back to where you had it fixed and tell them you don't want the free upgrade they gave you.

I am not sure exactly where it was repaired, though I am pretty sure it was by apple, as the receipt had apples all over it and It was still in warranty.

As a policy, apple does not upgrade computers to make ammends. In fact, as a policy Apple does not say it's sorry. Period.

What they will do however is, if they run out of something like your old optical drive, it upgrade it to the next level they have on hand. This goes so far as to replacing old hard drives with new high capacity models that short stroke the head to match the old capacity.

Sorry, I made a mistake on that: I have checked the receipt and it was originally the Superdrive. However, I was under the impression that the superdrive a-la 2003 was not able to RE-write DVDs, only to write them.

They also upgraded my mouse to the Pro-mouse when the cable fell out of the end.

word03 wrote:

That iBook of yours shipped with 128MB of RAM AND a copy of OS X 10.0.... now THAT would be interesting!

It was. Though, I was given the 10.1 Update disc when I bought it. I used 10.0 briefly, it felt just marginally more polished than the public beta, which i had used on my bondi prior to this. It was a good machine, which served me well into 2003. I moved up to PowerBook G4's at that point.

- iant,