Nero under WinXP

[WebDude]

I'm running Nero 5.578. Just recently did a new install of WinXP Pro, and loaded Nero on it. Now I get a strange behavior. I have a Plextoer 24x burner, and when I copy a CD the buffer underrun protection has to kick in 4 or 5 times to complete the disk. The disks are fine, but this is strange. I have a very fast system, and never had the buffer underrun protection kick in (under Win2K). But XP seems really different. If I sit and watch the burn progress, it seems like after 30 or 40 seconds, the hard drive buffer stops filling up and is bleed down to zero. Then the buffer underrun protection kicks in, the write light on the burner goes cold, and the software starts filling the buffer again. Once it's filled, the writing begins again, and the whole process cycles.

I've increased the buffer size to 80 meg, which Nero says is the max. I've noticed on the Nero site that they mention Win2k support for their software, but there is no mention of XP. Has anyone else had problems with Nero under XP? Just wondering if this is specific to my system, or maybe there is a setting in Nero I can change.

Thanks.

WebDude

 

[cjsketchy]

Did you get the update for CD burners in WinXP from MS? It's on windows update.

 

[PowerYoga]

actually once i had a buffer underrun.... make that 56 underruns before the CD finished. Don't worry about it if the cd comes out fine though. Its bound to underrun sometime if you run XP because its sooooooo resource hungry...

 

[Miramonti]

5572 works great with xp and a liteon 24x.

 

[Luden]

If you want to speed up nero a little bit disable the windows xp built in burning software.

Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services > then find and right click on IMAPI CD-Burning > properties > disable.

 

[rb56]

I had a similar problem a few weeks ago when I did a fresh install of XP, you might want to check to make sure you have DMA enabled. I had forgot to check after the install.

rb56

 

[WebDude]

Thanks for all the responses. I'm finally getting down to the heart of the problem, after spending some hours on it.

I should have said that even though I have an IDE burner (Plextor), the rest of my system is SCSI. I didn't think that was crucial, but it turns out it is.

I have a Plextor 40x Wide SCSI drive, so I couldn't understand why I was getting buffer underruns. So after trying everything else, I decided to run CDspeed on that drive. My max speed was 10x!! Incredibly poor performance. So I started hunting around the Adaptec site, since I have an Adaptec 29160 controller running my SCSI system. This is what I found:

[dated Mar. 27, 2002, like yesterday!] "Ultra160 Driver Release Candidate 1 for Windows XP This driver has been developed to overcome speed negation issues with some devices, like scanners, CDs and CD-Rs, that may default to the slowest speed (asynchronous) when using the embedded driver in XP. This can cause buffer under-runs on some CD Recorders."

Well there it is. I would like to say the problem has been solved, but my Windows XP will not let me install the Adaptec driver. It's not that I get a warning about an unsigned driver, which I can ignore and then proceed. It just doesn't recognize the Adaptec drive as valid and won't give me the option to install it. So I'm still working on that. But at least the problem has been nailed down.

It's kinda funny. I held off moving to XP for months now, thinking they would get all the major bugs out of it. Looks like they still have some major ones.


WebDude

EDIT: Figured out how to force WinXP to accept the driver (me just dense, duh!) and the new driver does solve the problem. I should have taken a snapshot of the CD-Speed graph of my UltraPlex Wide before the driver change. It was quite laughable.