I'm running a home built 900Mhz AMD Thunderbird 30 GB hard drive UATA 100, 448MB SDRAM, DFI AK-75EC Mother board, Creative 52X CD-ROM with DMA enabled and Sony 12x8x32 CD-RW with DMA enabled. Widows XP Pro

It doesn't matter if I burn on the fly or from the hard drive it will buffer under run at any speed. I'm using the Sony CD Extream software with the XP patch, and Nero. For the life of me I cannot figure this out. If anyone can help??


Thanks

When you burn don't use your computer. Just leave it alone when you are burning. Try to burn at 2x.

I don't use my computer when I burn because I don't want to take up and of the CPU or RAM. And as I stated in my fist post it will buffer under run at any speed.

Have you got the reader and writer on separate IDE ports??

This will certainly make a difference for OTF burning.

Yeah the writer is Primary slave and the reader is Secondary Master. I think I might just have a bad drive

Have you checked it in the nero toolkit
drive speed and
cd speed to see how it performs?

Also although you've got them on separate ide ports some writers like to be on a different port to their hard drive, worth a try if you haven't already tried this.

Its also worth checking the firmware edition is uptodate if you are having problems.

http://www.firmware.fr.st/

Are you on cable? If you have a pause button on your cable modem try hitting it while burning. Then you can turn off any firewalls safely. There's always something trying to look in your box when you're on cable (it seems like it anyway) so a firewall may be working quite a bit. Have you gone the control/alt/delete routine to shut down running proggies you don't need? Extreme, point32, systray and Explorer (not "internet" explorer) are all you really need. You sound like someone who probably already knows all that though, so I would guess there's a software problem. Could it be your video card and CDRW are sharing the same IRQ? Try and give the CDRW it's own IRQ and see if that helps. The only other thing I can think of is to make sure you turn off your screen saver and and any power saving features, and you could try taking your video down to 16 bit color. That will save some system resourses and you probably won't notice the dif in the way your screen looks. Todays video cards have an awful lot of onboard memory though so that's not likely to be your problem. Could it be you don't have very much space allocated for your temp directory? I don't know anything about Extreme but you might look in the options and see if there's anything about what to use for a temp directory. If it uses Windows Temp Files then make sure you empty out that Windows Temp folder before you burn. A full Temp folder will cause system lockups and I would guess your Extreme software might look at that and think its out of system resourses or a buffer underrun. You never know.

Okay I have a GeForce 4 with 128MB DDR RAM on board so I don't think that is the problem. CD Extreme uses its only bin file in its directory. I don't ever use screensavers and unfortunately I don't qualify for Cable Internet. I took a look at my page file and noticed that it has allocated it's self 386MB on my hard drive so I stepped that up to 1024MB. I'll go see if that worked.

Well, it worked and it did it at 12x. But I still can't understand why this stupid thing needs that many resources 448 megs of RAM and a Gig of page file. This can't be normal. I've seen them work on prebuilt computers. And few even possess that much memory.

It probably has to do with the way your swap file is set up. I don't know anything about XP though. Well, at least you've got a temporary fix. In the meantime why don't you drop Sony or the makers of Extreme (if it's not Sony) a note and ask them what the deal is. It's probably some simple thig we're missing. Good luck.

Okay I found the problem. I need to flash my BIOS to a newer version to support the newest DMA\EIDE drivers for my motherboard.

Well thanks everyone for the help.