Hello everyone! It's been a long time since I've been here, but I just picked up a new burner, and I've got a few problems. If anyone has any tips, I'd really appreciate the help.
I just replaced my HP 9110i with an HP 9710i. The specs are 16x/10x/40x, with an 8Mb buffer, but no underrun protection. I never had a problem with the old one, burning at 8x, running Win98SE, and then upgraded to Win2000. I have a CompUSA PC, with a 400Mhz Celeron, 256 Mb of RAM, and many gigs of free space on my 2 drives, which are freshly defragged. So far, I've burned 7 discs, all coasters, except the last one, where I dropped the speed down to 8x. Is this the fastest I can expect with this CPU? As long as it works, I guess it's okay with me, but I was hoping for a bit more speed.
Also, I have the burner as a slave, on the secondary IDE controller, with DMA enabled, as per HP's instructions. I tried disabling DMA as well, but I still had the same problems.
The blanks I'm using are 80 min/700 Mb 16x rated PNY discs, by the way, and I've burned at least 100 of them with the old burner, with no problems. Perhaps this is as fast as they will go? Again, thanks for any help you can give me. This place has taught me a lot, and I really appreciate it. Thanks! -The Dog

You should be able to burn at 16X from the HD. If you are having problems on the fly it could be the CD-ROM or having them on the same channel.

Try some Kodak Gold, Sony or TDK media if you are having trouble burning from the HD.

Converting MP3 on the fly can cause speed problems as well on some systems. Be more specific about what you are doing.

(in reply to saltydog)

You are certainly using good media.

You say you are recording MP3 files. Are you just copying them as data or converting to wave on the fly? Converting MP3 to wave on the fly requires a reasonably fast CPU at 16X. If you bought the burner primarily to record MP3 files to wave so they can be played on a CD-ROM player, you might need a CPU upgrade to do 16X.

(in reply to saltydog)

Thanks for the reply! You know, I KNEW I would forget to include all the details... actually, I'm just making a disc of MP3's, to play in my Philips EXP-103 MP3 player. I've done this once at 16X, and a few of the files won't play correctly, either in the player itself, or even on the PC, with Winamp. I kill all apps and non-critical program threads before burning, so I don't think that this is the problem. I hate to admit it, but I'm stumped. Oh well - if this is as high as I will get (8X), maybe I'll buy a new PC for my burner - isn't that kind of backwards? :-)
-Bob
P.S. I just noticed that the TDK discs I also stocked up on are 16X as well. I'm going to give them a shot later on tonight.

(in reply to saltydog)

The MP3 files should copy as normal data for what you are doing. I would think you shouldn’t have any problem from the HD at 16X. Maybe the TDK will work for you. It appears from the messages that you are having media problems from the “This is not a CD-Recordable” and “Could not perform Fixation”.

The log says the media was made by Taiyo Yuden, which is excellent. I have read that sometimes the ATIP isn’t correct. Major makers will sell templates for the CDs with their name in the ATIP. It shows up as their stuff, but can be cheap stuff instead. Maybe they didn’t actually make the PNY discs.

Get back with how the TDK works out.

(in reply to saltydog)

Just a thought: did you check the Test Maximum Speed box in Nero before burning... just to see what Nero has to say about it?

(in reply to saltydog)