Hi

My Pc has recently developed a problem where it locks up around halfway through dvd burning.

I have an Athlon 2600XP, 512mb of DDR ram, 400gb of hard drive space and a Pioneer 106 writer, using Ritek G04 dye blanks.

Burning DVD images from the hard drive, it locks up at anywhere between 40% to 70%. Running task manager alongside tells me either Alcohol 120% or explorer is using 100% of my CPU.

It does the same thing using Stomp Record-now Max. The problem is present in simulation or write, on both programs.

I've tried it in safe mode, same problems.

There's nothing wrong with the image file or the writer as they work on my other PC. Not a free drive space issue as the c: drive has 19gb free. It's a fairly recent installation of XP.

Does anyone have any suggestions please? :)

TIA
Chris

If all else fails try a system restore to a point before the trouble started. You may have installed a program/game recently that screwed with your settings.

Ensure that DMA is enabled on both IDE Channels, as burning shouldn't really use much PSU resource.

Don't have system restore enabled, I usually just reinstall windows when things start going badly wrong. Will try that, maybe.

DMA is already enabled on everything. The CPU isn't constantly at 100, it's at 3-5% then it jumps to 100% when it locks up.

Cheers
Chris

How have you got your drives configured ? and are there other devices on your IDE Channels ?

Also has this just started happening ..... i.e did the setup work ok previously ?

2 things come to mind :

1. Bad memory stick

2. Underpowered PSU

Computer is only a couple of months old (self-built). This problem has only just started happening but it does have a tendency to blue screen with random faults every couple of days.

IDE configuration is:

Primary master - 60gb Maxtor HD
Primary Slave - 120gb WD HD
Secondary master - LiteOn 52x CD writer
Secondary slave - Was the Pioneer 106, now empty
IDE3 - 250gb Maxtor HD

Power supply is a generic 400W one.

I've tested the ram with one of the testing programs, but it didn't find anything wrong. Will try another, someone recommended
Ontrack SystemSuite so i'm getting that to test things with.

Thanks for your help so far.

Cheers
Chris

Hmmmm. .... if it's bluescreening out every few days, I would check the CPU temps too, could be faulty fan or heatsink.

Also, you could try making the 106 the master on the secondary channel, it seems to like being the master (bit like my missus :D) ... I dont think this will affect your problem, but it may improve things when you get the freeze issue sorted.

Also ... just a thought ... you haven't got it overclocked have you ?

Now that you mention it the cpu does seem a little warm... 52c/125f at about 30% usage...

Thanks for the advice on the 106, i'll put it as the master when i put it back.

System's not overclocked, Athlon 2600+ running at 2.08ghz.