I don't know about you, but I just love impressing the babes with benchmarks from my CD-Rom drive. So what if most programs install or load at their own pace regardless the speed of the drive? Sick as it sounds, I upgraded my former Kenwood 52X drive for this 72X drive, and I couldn't be happier. Like other recent Kenwoods, this one uses the Zen Technologies multi-beam system, which reads several areas of the disk at once, allowing for 72X levels of throughput without rotational speeds that could lift your CPU off the floor. The thing is fast. All benchmarks report that the Kenwood does deliver - at or near the 72X rating. Access times are in the 90ms range usually, which is okay but not as brilliant as I'd like.

What I do like about the 72X is that it seems to fix production and compatibility problems Kenwood has had with earlier models. I had no problem reading every CD-R I could toss at it, for instance, and it has performed flawlessly for months now. I know that our own Sharky complains that his unit shakes like crazy, but I haven't experienced any of this. Sharky also more than most humans - so I'm guessing a lot of things in his life shake more than they do in mine. In my experience, the Kenwoods have been remarkably quiet and much smoother than some of the 40X CD-ROM jackhammers I've had in my system.

But here's the best part. I find the speed to be essentially irrelevant, which makes it a perfect geek extravagance. Most games and programs load according to their own pace, I find, so very little actually uses that 72X power. Video is very smooth, of course. And with a 2MB memory buffer, it better be. But most video is good at 24X and up, anyway. On occasion, a game like Unreal will load in little over a minute, which is pretty cool. But for some strange reason I find very few women who admit to being impressed by such raw exhibitions of silicon muscle. Their loss. Like a turbo-charged sports car, the point of having that much power is not using it but knowing you could.