Included in the box is a simple installation manual (4 pages of which is English), an analogue CD Audio cable, mounting screws, DOS drivers, and a bundle copy of PowerDVD v2.55, one of the best of the Software DVD players.

You'll notice that this drive has a slot loading mechanism. Having had a slot-load CD drive for several years, I've come to like these types of mechanisms. The Aopen's loading and ejection mechanism is smooth, and seems to work well, grabbing the cd just before it's all the way in on insertion, and ejecting it just far enough to grab the center hole on ejection.

The included PowerDVD v2.55 is a nice Software DVD player, and my preferred player here. We're finally long past the point in both the video card and CPU power department, to where Software based DVD playback is a no-brainer. Any system faster than 350mhz, with a video card manufactured within the last two years or so, should be able to play back DVD video without too much trouble. With the testbed system here consisting of a Intel Pentium3-700 running @ 1001mhz, and a Hercules Prophet 3D DDR/DVI Geforce, I've got plenty of DVD decoding power available.

How does the drive perform? Well, I pitted it against my own personal DVD drive, a Toshiba SD-MD1212 6x DVD drive, that I've had since the beginning of the year. It's always served adequately playing DVD movies here, but has been somewhat of a compromise in CD read speeds. Even my CD-R drive (Plextor 8x20 SCSI) is faster in CD playback. 

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