I’ve been having a few issues lately reading discs in my NEC DVD rewriter. So the choice was spend £10 on a cleaning disc that might not fix the problem. Or buy a new drive for £16.53 (plus VAT). So I bought the NEC AD-5170A-01.

The first NEC rewriter has been great and a vast improvement on my previous Lite-On model, which regularly messed up when writing discs.

Also I bought a fast 2Gb compact flash card for the camera: £18 (+ VAT). Whoo, that’s 452 nine-megapixel JPEG images at the best resolution. Or just over 100 in uncompressed RAW format.

But my favourite purchase is this USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure for £12.20 + VAT. A neat design and the best part is that it has no noisy fan. It stays cool thanks to the aluminium construction. I think I may get a second one.