I’ve had a bit of a time lately with my CD Burner taking 10 minutes to burn a CD, which is ridiculous, as some newer machines can burn a whole DVD in not much different time. I didn’t get around to figuring out deeply what I could do about it. I checked the Device Manger (right click on “My Computer” and choose the “Hardware” tab. Then, select “Device Manager”) and I noticed that my CD Burner, which was on the middle of the UDMA cable (the slave position) was in PIO mode, even though I had selected “DMA, if available” as the preferred mode of the IDE controller (you can see this by double clicking the “Primary IDE Controller” in the Device Manager). Well, there is a cause for this and also a fix. More likely than not, Windows “decided” to use the much slower PIO mode when it encountered more than 6 CRC errors at one point or another. This can happen if you put in a scratched CD. If you’re a regular visitor, you know that I have kids. I’ll say no more about that.
The good news is that there’s a solution and its everywhere on the net. It does involve editing the registry and changing a few values (or deleting and reinstalling the device - not my favorite option, since it is the disk controller that has my hard drive on it). The even better news is that I found a page that explains the procedure, or, if you’re too lazy, you can use a little script they came up with to do the editing for you. I ran the script. After a reboot, I got UDMA2 for my CD Burner and a full CD (697MB at normal size and 800MB ISO images) in just over 3 minutes, which is good enough for my old machine. Its nice to have that back. The CPU isn’t stuck at 100% while I burn a CD either. Now off to try Linux Mint…
You should use iTunes to rip your CD’s I did and it was pretty fast.
Oh, never mind, I thought you were making MP3’s.
Don’t use Nero for making images of CD’s it makes them jittery.
I’ve never had a reason to copy images, I just MP3 them. A lot of modern players play mp3’s nowadays anyway.
No reason to copy images? Didn’t drop that game CD on the floor and scratch it enough that you weren’t sure it would play again? Never wanted to make a playable Video CD of your home movie footage?
I’m talking about Windows defaulting to a MUCH slower and ancient transfer mode. Its like taking your 52x CD Burner and making it a 1x.
Oh yeah, and iTunes sucks and Nero sucks more! For Windows, I use WinAVI converter for my video conversion needs and QCD’s built in mp3 output plugin for mp3s. Once I ditch the Sony mp3 player for a decent one that supports ogg, I’ll say goodbye to closed format for audio anyhow.
The more I hear about linux, the better it sounds. Wish I had enough brains to learn all of the commands.
Windows has made me lazy. It is so much easier to point and click-and pray.
Funny that you should say that. I can probably furnish you with a CD of Linux that you can install with about 5 mouse clicks and have tons of applications already installed. Try that with Winblows (and have DMA work on your drives! LOL)