Please make the "No DVD Drive detected" nag screen optional

[ichinisan]

In this day and age, netbooks, sub-notebooks, and ultraportables without built-in optical drives are actually REALLY common. Therefore, it stands to reason that there are more external drives in use than in the past. It's time to adjust the behavior of the program to accommodate these people.

With my last netbook, I rarely used the external optical drive (DVD burner). Rather than tolerate AnyDVD HD nagging me every time I restarted the PC, I just disabled it until I was ready to use it, which makes sense for a resource-starved netbook anyway. It was an 8GB SSD upgraded to a 20GB 1.8" HDD, so there wasn't much room for dealing with it anyway.

With my Alienware M11x though, I rip, burn, and watch DVD/Blu-Ray movies/discs all the time. It has a higher resolution screen and a much larger HDD, which many of the latest netbooks have as well (1366x76. Sure, they are probably going to choke on HD, but the owners are in the same situation with DVD (I assume that this is also a problem for regular AnyDVD customers). Even so, the optical drive only gets connected when I am ready to do one of these activities. I'm sure that this is the usual usage scenario for any notebook without an integrated optical disc drive (ODD). The reasoning: Any other time than when I want to use the ODD, I would not want the complexity or the wires, bulk of the attachment, or additional power-drain of having it connected when I am not using it. This means that I get nagged with the "No DVD Drive detected" message any time I boot or restart my computer.

The nag message lists "Possible reasons," none of which apply to the typical owner with their ODD in the carrying case. The closest one is "You don't have a DVD drive, buy one." Not only should that be TWO sentences, but it should say "You don't have a DVD drive connected. Connect one." Of course, if you didn't own one, you'd have to obtain it (that's a given). The next closest one says that your external DVD drive is not powered on or is not properly connected. It's actually not connected at all, which is perfectly "proper" when you don't intend to use it yet. Power to an unconnected drive is irrelevant.

Now, installing Virtual Clone Drive will get rid of the nag, but it also hogs more system resources and is not something you want running all the time on a gaming system used to play legitimate games that you own. This is due to copy protections which attempt to detect virtual drives and refuse to run, even from physical media. As such, I leave it disabled until I need it, as any power user should.

Of course, most netbook users don't have the drive space for complete ISO images on the HDD, so expecting them to have/use Virtual Clone Drive for any other reason than circumventing the nag screen is unreasonable. Why not just fix the nag screen by making it optional? Just give me a "My disc drive is external and is not connected. Please do not warn me about this in the future" option? Is that so hard?

While we're at it, there's one other thing that needs correcting in that same dialog:
It's a notice, not a "WARNING!"

On a side note, when ripping, showing "[Minutes]:[Seconds] secs remaining" is improper. It should not say "secs remaining" when both minutes and seconds are presented. As such, it implies that the minutes are "seconds" and the number to the right of the colon is a sub-measurement of seconds.

Edit: I'm pretty sure that that option wasn't there on a very old release when I first encountered the issue (200. If it was added later, I would expect the default behavior to be disabling the nag when auto-start is enabled AND I would expect a check box on the dialog itself to dismiss it in the future. Either way, I see it now. Thanks.

[Frank]

Did you think about a left click on the tray fox and then "settings"?

Do that now.

Look down the list.

See it?

Super. Now turn that off.

Wasn't that easy?