No offense, but I'd have to say it's difficult to turn your experience with the product into a universal fact about it. I'd be willing to bet that it's the best selling device of this type, and that means that there will be plenty of people with problems. It sucks that yours died in a couple months, but I find it hard to make that common trait, given what I said earlier about the hundreds of discs I've made in the year I've owned mine.

When you say that there's a widespread problem with burning at 4x, do you mean after the firware upgrade?