Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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310 of 317 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fix your discs; don't ditch them!, September 14, 2004
After a hard drive going bad scratched up several discs, I had two options...toss the old discs and buy new ones or invest in a disc repair kit. I started researching repair kits and was less than impressed with the plastic hand-held type that seemed most popular. Someone else had recommended this product, so I took a look.
Since there were no reviews at the time on Amazon, I did a more extensive look around the web for reviews of this product from Alera. I really never found any, but I was impressed with the fact that for about the same price as a competitor's hand-held unit, this one came with several different kits (cleaning, repair, etc.) and was fully automatic. So, I decided to buy it.
Wow, am I impressed! Within ten minutes of getting it home, I had it up and running and repairing a disc. Three minutes later, the damaged disc was playing again with no problems. I've repaired five discs so far and have cleaned about ten. The cleaning and repair kits are easy to use, though I'd recommend reading through ALL the instruction manual before beginning, as the simplest process (cleaning) is listed last in the manual.
This kit can repair CD, DVD and video game discs. Since the unit is fully automatic, all you do is screw in the repair wheels, add three drops of repair goop to one of the wheels, put your damaged disc in, close the lid and press the button that says "repair". Three minutes later, your disc should be fixed. Of course, this kit is not going to repair deep cracks or magically replace missing chunks of data, but for surface scratches that are causing your disc readers to come up with errors or producing glitches on your DVD player, this kit is wonderful. The cost of the item is more than made up in being able to save your collection of more expensive games, CDs or DVDs!
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110 of 115 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It actually works!!!, May 11, 2005
Wow I have over 400 CD/DVDS some were in horrible shape I figured I'd have to buy new ones But, i came to Amazon and read the good reviews for this product and I bought it. Well, it works great!!! I repaired discs that had some bad scratches in them and thought hopeless!! Before throwing those old discs out give this product a try!! I am very happy!!! karen
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49 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It works, but, March 20, 2006
I have a couple of scratched DVDs that I wanted to fix. After reading the reviews here and elsewhere, I ordered the Alera DVD/CD Disc Repair Plus.
I was able to successfully repair the two damaged DVDs, but it took hours of effort due to the poorly-written instructions that have been noted by others here.
I developed my own method for repairing one stubborn scratch I had on one of my DVDs. After determining that the repair mode alone (yellow pads) would not repair the scratch after a number of passes, I used the pink pads, followed by a number of passes with the yellow repair pads.
The problem with the repair process is that it is difficult to get the exact amount of repair polish on the disk. Too little, and the scratch is not repaired, too much and the disk doesn't play right. The instructions call for three drops of repair liquid to be applied to the pads. This works if the drops are exactly the right size. I found another way to get the amount just right.
Start with two drops of repair liquid, or three very small drops. Play the DVD at the spot in the movie where it skips, and see if it is fixed. If it is not fixed, run the disk through the repair process again, putting just one drop on the yellow pad this time. Play the DVD again to see if it is fixed. Repeat this procedure, one drop at a time until the skip is fixed. You do not have to clean the yellow pads in between passes (until you are finished with the repair). Do not wash the DVD between repair passes. Washing the DVD puts you back to square one.
The repair liquid seems to be a polish that works somewhat like wax. It appears to be similar to the polish/cleaner used ceramic stovetops. It fills in the scratches and polishes over the repaired area. Running a repaired DVD or CD through the disk cleaning cycle seems to clean off the repair polish, exposing the scratches once again.
So when your disk is repaired do not wash it in the future. If it needs to have dust cleaned off, wipe it off gently with a soft cloth. If you do need to wash the disk in the future, you will probably have to run it though the repair cycle again to reapply the polish to the disk's surface.
I hope this helps. The Alera machine does work, but it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out how to make it work due to the inadequacy of the instructions shipped with it.
A couple of other things not covered in the instructions, the cleaning and repair pads screw counter-clockwise into the machine. The wet and dry sides are not labled on the pads themselves, but on the machine. The wet cleaning pads do not have to be filled to 80 percent capacity like it says in the instructions. That is wasteful, unless you are cleaning a lot of DVDs or CDs all at once. A 20 percent fill works just as well. You are going to lose what cleaning liquid you don't use immediately due to evaporation.
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