Why does burning a DVD slow down my computer so much?

[Shawn]

I have a 3.02GHz with HT and 640MB 800MHz RDRAM yet my computer gets rather slow burning a DVD. Also I'm burning at 4x for the first time (just got new media) yet it seems to burning slower than that. The write light keeps flasing on and off like it keeps stopping and the buffer keeps jumping all over the place. WTF? How do you people burn at 16x? My computer seems uncapable of even burning at 4x.

 

[crab]

Are all of your chipset drivers updated? Is the burner on the same channel as your hard drive?

 

[Shawn]

Hmm.... I dunno. Whatever came with XP. It's an Intel Chipset. Also the DVD-Burner is on my mobo's onboard Promise RAID/ATA controller. I wonder if I should move it to the secondary IDE channel?

 

[crab]

You've never installed any mobo drivers? I guess it can't hurt to try updating them.

Get the burner on it's own channel.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Originally posted by: Supercharged
Hmm.... I dunno. Whatever came with XP. It's an Intel Chipset. Also the DVD-Burner is on my mobo's onboard Promise RAID/ATA controller. I wonder if I should move it to the secondary IDE channel?

For a person with as many posts as you have, you should know by now you need chipset drivers for you computer! Let me guess, this is a dell machine? Here I will even give you the link to the intel chipset drivers you need (couldn't hurt). The drivers work on all intel chipsets and I'm assuming your using the 850E chipset no?

http://support.intel.com/suppo...psets/sb/CS-009238.htm

Download the Intel® Chipset Software Installation Utility and Intel® Application Accelerator.

Chipset driver does what it's suppose to do and the intel application accelerator will MAKE SURE you have DMA enabled on all of your devices (if they support it). For example I was running DMA but wasn't very fast on my HDD and I didn't even have DMA at all on another device, after installing it it made the DMA on the HDD to DMA 5 and DMA 2 on the optical drive which was on PIO:Q

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Supercharged Also the DVD-Burner is on my mobo's onboard Promise RAID/ATA controller.
I wonder if I should move it to the secondary IDE channel?

that sometimes makes a big (positive) difference for optical drives compared to running on what's essentially an integrated PCI card.

 

[Shawn]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons

Originally posted by: Supercharged Also the DVD-Burner is on my mobo's onboard Promise RAID/ATA controller.
I wonder if I should move it to the secondary IDE channel?

that sometimes makes a big (positive) difference for optical drives compared to running on what's essentially an integrated PCI card.

This cured it. I am able to burn at 4x now without any interuptions.

I am curious though, what's wrong with the drivers XP provides? Last time I tried to install intel's drivers over XPs I had a decrease in performance. Also Intel's Application Accelerator has caused BSOD for me in the past. Took me forever to figure out what was causing them.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Supercharged

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons

Originally posted by: Supercharged Also the DVD-Burner is on my mobo's onboard Promise RAID/ATA controller.
I wonder if I should move it to the secondary IDE channel?

that sometimes makes a big (positive) difference for optical drives compared to running on what's essentially an integrated PCI card.

This cured it. I am able to burn at 4x now without any interuptions.

I am curious though, what's wrong with the drivers XP provides? Last time I tried to install intel's drivers over XPs I had a decrease in performance.

The biggest problem, generally, is that they're ancient (since WinXP only has drivers from a few years ago unless you have a newer install disk with SP2). If you have a newer chipset that it doesn't know about, it may not have *any* specific drivers for it, and will have to use generic drivers, which tend to be quite slow.

Also Intel's Application Accelerator has caused BSOD for me in the past. Took me forever to figure out what was causing them.

IAA is separate from the chipset drivers, and I've generally heard bad things about it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

On any Promise controller newer than an Ultra66 (and possibly the first batch of Ultra100s), running anything newer than 2.00.00.29 drivers - DONT put opticals on a Promise controller. They will run in PIO mode, as you've found out.

 

[Auric]

Promise doesn't do ATAPI, essentially. Anytime a drive seems slow, check the transfer mode of the associated controller in Device Manger or its own applet. Burning can take five times as long sans DMA.

 

[Zepper]

Yes, if you need a separate controller to run ATAPI or old slow devices like the LS-120 Superdisk drive, get a controller with SiliconImage logic - those will do everything from the oldest/slowest to ATA133 RAID.
. And also update your ASPI layer software to avoid strange burning issues - DL from http://www.adaptec.com. They provide this software to M$.

Attn: Everyone that sees this post. Update your ASPI layer software via the link above and pass the word to your friends! I'm fairly sure most users don't have a clue they need to keep this updated along with your other mobo chipset and device drivers.

.bh.

Rain, rain GO AWAY.!.