CD/DVD Burning Buffer
 

This is a very strange situation. Whenever I use a nero or alcohol to burn anything the process slows down to a crawl. The DVD discs fail with 100% accurarcy, while with CDs it's hit and miss to see if burning is actually successful. At first, I thought it was because I have installed Chaos Theory which uses starforce (funny how google search returns starforce as the primary reason for slow burning speed :biggrin: ).
However, after removing both Chaos Theory and Starforce as well as reinstalling the IDE controllers, things didn't really get better, so I decided to sit through one of those 60-minutes-failed-dvd burning sessions and noticed that the buffer stops loading after the initial loading. I burned some more CDs and noticed the same thing.

I guess I'll put it another way to better explain. You know how the buffer underrun loads up like 80 mb at the beginning of the burning? During a regular session, it loads up to 100% on the buffer bar and stays 100% until like last 10 seconds of burning since there's nothign more to cache. However, now, the buffer loads up to 100% and stops. It then slowly declines to 0% and after that the disc is just burnt without the memory buffer. Because of the lack of buffer, cd and dvd burning is forced to step down to 16x and 2x max respectively. The dvd 2x always fails since it doesn't seem to be supported by my dvd writer, while the cd at 16x runs out of the hardware buffer and fail burning about half the time.

I was wondering if there's some registry to change, since it seems like this problem is caused by the lack of memory buffer, which happens in both alcohol and nero so it must be application independent.

Here's my system stats
Pentium M 740 1.73 Ghz Processor
2x 256 MB PC4200 533 Mhz DDR2 RAM
64MB Mobility Radeon X700
QSI (?) DVD +- RW SDW-082

So, anyone got any ideas?


edit: checked for PIO/DMA already, even though this is memory buffer problem.

Can you give a screenshot of all running processes in your Windows Task Manager?

When you commence burn, are you positive everything else is closed?

How much space do you have left on your hard disks?

When was the last time you defragmented them?

sorry, been a bit busy.

I don't have a screeny, but the running processes is nod32 with AMON disabled, outpost, nero/alcohol, task manager, DKservice, and the rest are just xp processes.

Around 10 gb left, defragged RIGHT before burning.
That's pretty much it.
The problem is that it's actually loading the buffer on start fine, I doubt it's hard drive related. Since it's happening to both nero and alcohol, it seems to be application dependent as well....

Anyways, next time I burn I'll screen the beginning, the end, as well as the running process.

Try to burn at a lower speed.

You could also try flashing a new firmware for your drive, providing that there is a newer version available.

already updated firmware, and tried burning at lower speed.
Remember that dvd writers can only go so slow. 2x renders them unreadable for my dvd writer.

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