Hmm, upgrades

So my new (ish) work laptop has DVD R but not W, and following on from my external HD fiasco I decided to purchase an external DVD burner. Yes, I have accounts with Picasa, PutPlace and Live Mesh, but once bitten, twice shy, and I'm not going to lose a single byte of data ever again. Guaranteed*.

I bought a Lite-On IT EZ-DUB burner through Elara.ie (still a great store, despite the outcome of this particular sorry tale). I assumed when I bought it that I would get a simple plug-and-play external drive, that would just mount in a manner similar to a USB pen drive. Turns out that the burner is USB, but you need to install proprietary software to write files to a disc. Annoying, but manageable.

The infuriating thing is that the EZ-DUB proprietary software depends on Nero 7, and only Nero 7, to do the writes - it won't even load with any subsequent versions of Nero. This is the height of rudeness and lazy coding - Lite-On are basically giving you two fingers, and damning you to an eternity of being lumped with a particular version of the software if you want to do anything crazy like, I dunno, use the hardware for the purpose it was intended. I wonder if Nero know their software is being used in this manner? I can't see them being too happy that Lite-On have effectively blocked a whole swathe of customers from Nero's intended upgrade path?

Disappointing. Hopefully someone somewhere has hacked this...

* Not actually a guarantee...