A few years ago, CD-ROM drives were slow, and everyone was looking for a way to speed them up; now, they are excessively fast, and it's causing some problems. Noise, vibrations, and short spindown times plague most modern drives.
For quickly transferring large chunks of data, this is an acceptable trade-off, but those who wish to stream audio and video from a disc are often left disappointed by poor performance and distracting noise.
With many drives, it is possible to set the read speed to a value lower than the maximum speed. This makes the disc spin slower, reducing mechanical noise. Many also let you set the spindown time to a value higher than the default. This makes the disc stay spinning and ready to access data for longer spans of time.
Unfortunately, most CD-ROM drive vendors do not give you the programs you need to change these settings. That's where CD-ROM Tool comes in.
*** Note to Windows NT/2000/XP Users
CD-ROM Tool uses ASPI drivers to send commands to your drive. These drivers are included in Win95/98, but not in Windows NT/2000/XP. There are instructions in the readme.txt regarding installation of the aspi drivers.
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· CD-ROM Tool now comes in two flavors. CD-ROM Tool ASPI requires an ASPI layer to communicate with the drives, and can be used in Windows NT/95/98/ME/2K/XP. CD-ROM Tool SPTI, which can only be used in an NT-based version of Windows such as 2K or XP, does not require ASPI or any other helper software to commmunicate with the drives; however, the SPTI version is still somewhat experimental.
· Gave the CD-ROM interface code a makeover.
· Fixed a bug in the Automatic Set portion of the program.
· Hopefully the ASPI drive detection code is finally 100% correct.
· Added speed verification to the "Send Drive Data" window to prevent bogus speeds from being reported.
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