Thinkpads Forum

I have DLA on my T42 and was reading a little about it, just wondering if anyone has ever used it and is it what it claims to be, like another hard drive.

No one uses DLA, as far as I know. It just makes trouble, so uninstalling DLA is the best you can do for your Thinkpad.

DLA is Drive Letter Access. It makes your CD/DVD burner act like a giant floppy so you can drag and drop files to it. It is similar to Roxio's DirectCD or Nero's InCD. I think you need DLA installed to read from a CD written with DLA (same with DirectCD and InCD).

I don't use it either.

I would agree with s0larian. Just remove it...

That is kind of what I figured after reading about it and searching the forums for any info on it. Thanks..

I use DirectCD for making my daily backups for Quicken. Pretty nice being able to just write the backup to a CD, then remove the CD... as said above, like a big floppy drive. Other than that, I've never found any use for it.

Don't recent Windows and other OSes come with built-in UDF support to read packet-formatted discs? Though I'm not sure about exact compatibilities with different versions of UDF specs...

And years ago they were notorious about interoperability. BTW how come Sonic just doesn't merge their DLA with DirectCD since they bought Roxio?

agreed - just say no to DLA.

Am I the only person using DLA? I like DLA since it allows writing to a CD-R, unlike Nero InCD which requires CD-RW discs. And it's easier than using a burning utility, since DLA works with any character set and any filename (unicode), while the burning utilities require Latin characters.

FRiC wrote:I like DLA since it allows writing to a CD-R, unlike Nero InCD which requires CD-RW discs.

I wasn't aware of this. I have used INCD in the past, and was aware of the CD-RW limitation. In my brief overview of DLA, I thought it was basically the same as INCD. I didn't know you could use DLA with CD/R's - even DVD+-R's! But after reading your post and reviewing DLA help, I see that you are correct. That was my main complaint with INCD, the requirement of needing to use unreliable (IMHO) CD-RW disks. I may have to give DLA another look.

FWIW, I have not uninstalled DLA since I have received my T42, but just now checking I have not checked the box in CD/DVD drive properties to enable DLA on the drive. I have burned a bootable CD/R with Nero and CD/R backup disks with Stomp Backup MyPC on my ThinkPad, and burned DVD+R backup disks to an external DVD drive with Stomp Backup MyPC. Every burn went without a hitch. So apparantly you do not need to uninstall DLA to burn with other software. Maybe you just need to not have it enabled on the drive if you are going to use other burning software.

My understanding has been, you should only enable one UDF packet writer at one time (DLA, DirectCD, InCD, etc). But you can install and use multiple ISO burners, that's no problem.

BTW, DirectCD also allows writing to CD-R and DVD+/-R, just like DLA (but unlike InCD in the past, I'm not sure what the current situation is). With me it's usually a toss up about choosing between DirectCD and DLA (both are now products owned by the same company, so perhaps they might be merged later?).