Do retail optical drives still ship with software, Nero? [solved]

[Simplately]

Hello,
I have a dated system, but it works for me, put together by me. AMD Athlon 64 FX 57 CPU with a used Asus A8NE mb, and a nVidia GeForce 8500GT graphics card. I have two opitcal drives in my case, an Asus and a Lite-On, both DVD read/writers purchased six years ago. I would like to replace the Asus burner. Last time I ordered optical drive was retail, so it came in a box and also included Nero. The last time included Nero Essential 7. I was wondering if retail opitcal drives still ship with Nero? I've seen two places that ship with LightScribe by HP, but I'm interested in Nero, mainly because I use dial up and it is more convenient to get it included when ordering an optical drive. I was looking at Newegg and there were a few folks that said the drives were shipped in bubble wrap minus screws.
Much appreciated for your time.

[Ghitulescu]

OEM versions of Nero that come with the drives are generally stripped down to almost useless (so they can sell the Premium editions too).
For simple burns it's probably ok, but forget about NeroVision and stuff.
I use Nero since it's version 1.0.xx and I dropped using it when I've discovered ImgBurn. I still use Nero today, but for a very specific task, no other SW offers this simple: burning back my FLAC backups for carradio (it has to activate some features my burner has) to replace the scratched ones.

If you're interested only in simple burning (no authoring at all, nor editing), go with ImgBurn.

[hello_hello]

To answer your question.....
Retail drives no doubt still ship with software, whether it's Nero or something else would be up to the manufacturer of the drive and whoever they've made a deal with. Unless you get lucky and find someone here who's recently bought a particular brand of drive and can tell you it shipped with Nero, you might have to keep looking.

The type of drive you refer to Newegg selling is probably an OEM drive. They're cheaper than the retail version but they ship exactly how you described.... no retail box, no manual, no screws, no software.

The software which comes with retail drives may even be locked to that particular drive (or maybe they don't do that any more). Is that why you're concerned about the drive being bundled with software if you already have Nero?

As mentioned above, ImgBurn is a good choice for burning software and it's free. I have the full version of Nero 7 and really like it (never had a reason to upgrade), but if I had to stop using it I'd go with ImagBurn.

[Simplately]

Thanks for the fast responses and helpful advice.
hello_hello, no I wasn't concerned about that, but just wanted to get the latest Nero version without needing to download it. The version seven essentials is a very large chunk of software. I could use it, or try image burn as was suggested. It looks much smaller in size.
I did do another search for "ships with Nero" and found one of the reviewers at newegg said the asus brand he bought did ship with Nero 10, so that answered my question. If I wasn't so lazy, I would e-mail the stores that sell optical drives and ask them. It would be nice if the spec output had this information included under the Software section for the e-stores. As a side note, its interesting to see that our local wal-mart no longer sells internal hard drives or optical drives. I guess most people like laptops, but I don't.
Thanks again!