I can try... DMA stands for Direct Memory Access. When your burner was running with DMA turned off, the IDE bus required quite a bit of overhead from the CPU in order to move data around...the CPU was actually doing the work of moving data from the source to the burner. With DMA turned on, a separate bit of circuitry on the chipset, the DMA controller, actually takes on a significant portion of the CPUs job, namely providing the means to quickly move data from one point to another without using the CPU as an intermediary. In the past (actually, quite a while ago), DMA was exclusively in the realm of chip memory. It was a trick that Intel came up with to speed up the 8088 processor. Since the 486 (or thereabouts), with proper OS support, IDE peripherals can also use DMA. The reason that your burner wasn't working is probably because the CPU would become so busy doing other tasks with the OS that it couldn't devote enough time to keeping a steady stream of data flowing to the burner. Since burning CDs requires an uninterrupted flow of data, this caused your burner to prematurely close the CD. Hope that helps! Drew Dunn The NOSPIN Goup -----Original Message----- Hi all, I was having some trouble burning audio cds with a LG 12x burner. It would stop after one or two tracks and close the cd. I enabled DMA on the burner and on the hdd and now everythings works fine. Why? anyone got a technical explanation for me? Joe PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download visit our download web page at: http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml