i've just purchased a lite on 40x cd writer for my computer. i burnt an audio cd at 32x and it took 15 minutes. my old 12x writer would write it in 10 minutes at 10x. does anyone know why it taking so long?
my computer is a 300Mhz AMD with 390Mb RAM. the only other difference is that i've also put in a dvd rom drive. even if i try to only burn at 16x it still takes about 15 minutes (the cdr's are 40x so thats not the problem). any help greatly appreciated.

Is DMA enabled

no, if i enable it it locks the computer up. but it wasn't enabled on my 12x writer either tho. i've unplugged the dvd rom and still no change.

So you have the Lite-On in the secondary IDE port as master on its own and it locks up pc when you enable DMA, Correct.

Are you using a UDMA66 ribbon (a blue plug at one end), im assuming that it is not

Can you try the Lite-On in another machine

yes to the first bit and no to the second. i'm going to try the writer in the works computer tomorrow

DMA not being enabled is prolly your problem, also reading audio is very demanding for most CD/DVD readers. Your CDRW will only be able to burn audio at high speeds OTF if the DMA ability of your reader is up to the job.

Check out the test results for your reader at www.cdspeed2000.com/ to see how good/bad it is.

i've just tried it on the computer at work and writing at 32x with dma disabled took 6.5 minutes, with it enabled it took 4.5 minutes. this is quite different from the 15 minutes on my home computer, even with the dma disabled it is about 10 minutes slower at home. the bit i don't understand is that with my old 12x cd-writer i could burn a cd in 10 minutes with dma disabled so why is the faster writer slower?
i'm getting a amd xp1800 with 512Mb of ddr ram and 60Ghz hard drive next week so i'm hoping that this will sort the problem but i'm still curious as to the reasons for the problem.
there is a hard drive, a dvd drive and a cd-writer connected. what is the best way of connecting them on the ide's (eg hard drive and cd writer together with dvd on the other)?

I had something very similar.

The solution is to ensure than the drivers for the VIA bus chipset on the motherboard are installed. They are on the CD that comes with the motherboard.
If you don't have a CD, check on the motherboard web site for the latest drivers.

Without these drivers I was unable to set the DMA on all my drives and PC would lock up on burning, from both CD and hard disk.


Faster Processer will not help. DMA bypasses the processer, with DMA now enabled I write at X24 and hitting Ctrl, Alt, Delete when writing on XP brings up the system monitor and the processer (only a AMD 1GHz) is only running at 1 to 2 %

Good Luck hope this helps.

Brian

i have no cd and i've misplaced the book that came with it. is there a way of finding out which motherboard i have. all i know is i have an authentic amd k6 300Mhz chip

u must enable dma

if i do the computer locks up

download sandra standard from here

www.sisoftware.demon.co.uk/sandra/

run this and it will analyize your PC so you can see the make of motherboard and version number.

Then go to their web site for the files than should have been on the software CD to install the drivers to correctly run DMA mode.

I was in a shop today looking at burners, all the high speed ones had at least 350mhz minimum required and 500mhz recomended

seems that you cant get a shareware version of sandra unless you have intel, if you got amd, you need to buy the professional version. :(