Today I replaced a 3.5" floppy drive, a DVD-ROM drive, and a CD-RW drive in my WinXP machine with a single drive: the NEC DVD-RW ND-3520A. This drive reads and burns all current formats of DVD and CD media. I am able to rip entire albums (such as The Swinging Guitar of Tal Farlow ![[B00000HXFM]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
) to WMA Lossless files in less than 3 minutes.
Since WinXP has no built-in DVD writing software, I downloaded some excellent free software called CDBurnerXP Pro. So far, it has been reliable, easy to use, and fast.
Interesting note: The CPU temperature in my PC dropped ~5 degrees after removing all of the old drives. I assume this is because of better air flow and fewer heat-generating devices.
