We have tested CDR drives since 1996 for CDG Certification. We use to find as many as 6 out of 10 would not work long term... even 12 months... as these drives degrade slightly with use and time. Today, we don't see anywhere near that ratio, but we do reject some drives.
When you buy from MTU, you have access to our free support if you need help. We know exactly what to do in most cases as we deal exclusively with CDG discs and their special problems. You can read many testimonials in the Microstudio Help Forum and Testimonials where folks have purchased drives that "claim to do Karaoke" only to realize that the salesman's definition of Karaoke was "music only" i.e. no lyrics/graphics were copied. We had one gentleman who had made SIX drive purchases and none of them worked. He bought from MTU and voila, he was backing up his CDG discs in minutes.
As to XP and RAM, HP may have stripped some XP functions out for the "in house" XP version. However, generally, XP requires 256MB RAM ITSELF to run without hickups. Microstudio doesn't use more than 10MB of space, but when XP is already shoe-horned into 128MB, even taking 10MB can cause XP to complain. Save yourself some headaches and upgrade your RAM. Random problems due to low RAM are VERY difficult to diagnose.
The easiest drives to install are the USB. These simply plug into your USB-2 port and the computer recognizes it automatically. These also can be swapped between computers if that is important. The IDE drives are cheaper, but are mounted inside the computer, requiring a little more technical knowledge. If you want to use DVD drives in the future, purchase our model that supports DVD and CDG. It is a super drive, albeit a bit more expensive. Depends on what you want to do.
Microstudio is very easy to install and use. We bury all the technology of making a CDG discs. We have buttons to Import, Play, Write CD, etc. Anyone can use Microstudio if they know anything about using Windows.
