At 06:43 PM 08/02/2000 Pamela Leming wrote:
>I'm having a problem burning CDs.  I have a Packard Bell Intel Pentium MMX
200
>MHz system with 96 MB RAM.  I have one 4 GB HD partitioned into two 2GB
>partitions.  Each partition has about 600 MB free space.  I have a 40x CDROM
>and a Creative CD-RW RW6424E CD writer as a slave to the 40x drive.


Pamela

There's lots of variables and other factors involved here, even though
you've turned off all background processing. What is the source CD? Are you
doing digital audio extraction? What kind (brand) of CDR blanks are you
using (gold or green or blue CDRs may work better in your recorder)? Are
the buffers and cache settings of your recording software maximized? Are
the settings of the file system properties in Windows maximized? Are all
your drives defragmented (including the SWAP file)? Are all the proper
drivers loaded? Has any drive slipped into compatibility mode? Are your
CMOS settings optimized?

As was recommended, you can slow your recording speed to 1x, or you can try
to speed up your system by tuning it up. Clean out your system, check the
cables, verify proper cooling in the case, clean out your registry. Run
SCANDISK and Defrag. Fix the size of the SWAP file. CMOS settings are
important, so maximize the memory timing and the hard drive settings.

If you are doing direct CD player to CD recorder copies, you need to put
the drives on different IDE channels. Only one IDE device on a channel can
be active at a time (no simultaneous reads on the CD player while writing
to the CDR) and the CPU is involved in handling the transfers (assuming
non-DMA transfers). Also, your hard drive should not share an IDE channel
with any slower device (or with a device that may be in use during the
recording) since the programs and swap files are running from it.

You could also try a caching IDE controller, or switch to a SCSI CDROM
drive... The later is what I did: I have an UDMA 17GB IDE drive solo on the
primary IDE, an LS-120 and DVD on the secondary, a SCSI hard drive, 32x
CDROM, and a 8x Yamaha 8x CDROM burner on a 2940UW SCSI host adapter, and
sometimes must slow down to 6x or less when doing digital audio extraction.

If you are adventurous, you can use REGEDIT (to exceed the values in the
System Properties Performance window) and edit
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\CDFS to set
your CDROM CacheSize and Prefetch values higher (say 4 times higher). This
may be confusing process because the values may be stored either as DWORD
(hex) values or as binary. You'll probably see the following:

         Name            Data

        CacheSize       0000026b (619)    ; which is 619 x 2KB pages, default of 1238KB
        Prefetch        000000e4 (228)    ; which is about 228 KB, default for a 4x CDROM

To increase performance (which will reduce usable RAM), increase the values
(in HEXADECIMAL... if you have binary values, it won't look like
traditional ones and zeroes). Back up your Registry BEFORE doing this (all
changes occur immediately) and don't change anything if you don't know what
you're doing.

I really would NOT change the Registry values unless you receive no
satisfaction from all the other alternatives. I would rather slow down my
recording speed than tweak the Registry just for a single advantage like
this (incurring a system-wide reduction of RAM).

HTH.

Regards,

John Chin

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