Gateway AR230 Progressive-Scan DVD Player / Recorder
Bad user interface; unreliable recording
We bought a Gateway AR-230 in Jan 2004.  We found the user<br /><br />interface to be fairly bad.  The timer recording section<br /><br />is particularly bad (Timer recording allows: Once,<br /><br />Daily, Weekly, but doesn't have \\"Weekday\\", sigh; Timer<br /><br />recording has 5 or 6 slots, about 3 or 4 fewer than we need.)<br /><br />Note: if you have one, DEFINITELY get the current firmware<br /><br />from [...]  (version 1163 was released 2004-09-01)<br /><br />The manual is, to be charitable, bad.  Aside from leaving<br /><br />out a *lot* of information, the quality of the English in it<br /><br />(and in other online documents for the AR-230) is poor.<br /><br />I saved the worst for last ... it's very unreliable.  Of the<br /><br />last 4 DVD+RWs we tried to timer record, two failed to<br /><br />properly \\"stop\\" (one was in \\"Stopping\\" mode for 15 minutes<br /><br />before it finally stopped!).  The result were disks that<br /><br />were unreadable in the Gateway or in any other of several<br /><br />DVD drives I tried.  (Oh, I could see the VOB, IFO, BUP files,<br /><br />but they just weren't playable.)<br /><br />This may be tied to using Memorex media ... opinion on the<br /><br />web seems to be split on this.  We'd been using non-Memory<br /><br />successfully (95% success rate?) for most of the last year,<br /><br />and accidentally picked up some Memorex DVD+RWs recently.<br /><br />I had tried to return it about 1 week after the warranty<br /><br />expired ... no luck.  I should have ranted and raved then,<br /><br />but an upgrade (10 months ago) to firmware version 1139<br /><br />improved it from terribly to almost reliable.<br /><br />IIRC, it has no battery backup for the programming, so we<br /><br />have ours on a UPS.  (Clock must also be set manually :)<br /><br />All in all, an embarassing product ... a cheap price doesn't<br /><br />justify that!<br /><br />Tip for using any DVD recorder ... if you aren't going to save a show forever, record it on DVD+RW and avoid creating a disc<br /><br />you'll be throwing away!ord it on DVD+RW and avoid creating a disc<br /><br />you'll be throwing away!