About a week ago my parents bought a Toshiba Satellite L350 notebook. As with other brands, it comes with a lot of extra applications installed which you don’t need at all while taking away precious internal memory space. Luckily it is fairly easy to remove these applications. One application created by Toshiba, and supposed to be useful, is the application to create back-up discs which can come in handy when your notebook has crashed. It looks pretty easy to use, but has a big constraint when you want to actually create these discs.
My parents were given two Sony DVD+R discs to create the back-up, but when started, the application pretty soon gave an error (mostly about the power schedule) and the DVD is completely useless. After some searching on the web, I found suggestions to use ‘good brands’, or else the creation would fail. I’ve tried a Sony DVD+R disc, a PHILIPS DVD-RW disc, a Bruna DVD+R disc, but all of them made the application hang. The solution is pretty simple, but not documented very good on both the Toshiba documentation as well as the web: use DVD-R discs (DVD minus R discs). The brand doesn’t matter. When I used two Bruna DVD-R discs, the application finally created the back-up discs. My parents can now finally screw up their notebook in a safe way.