Nero question about burning

[sdsumike619]

I just got the newest version of Nero - is it normal for the computer response time to be verrrrrrrrrrrrry slow while burning a DVD?? Can't really seem to do much of anything while a DVD is burning, e.g. click the button to minimize a window and it takes several seconds to respond. Does this happen to everyone? Is there a way to have that not happen?

[jimmalenko]

In this day and age you should be able to do quite a lot of low-resource tasks like web-surfing while burning. If you're talking about Nero 7 I'd get rid of it and go back to 6, as the feedback here has been nothing short of terrible.

[sdsumike619]

well it's burning just fine actually...and it did the same thing with nero 6
made everything run really slow. I don't know if that's just something that happens while u burn dvds or it's specific to me?

[jimmalenko]

As I mentioned, I'm able to surf and do almost anything non-video-related ...... then again I've got a P4 3.0 and 1GB RAM ..... but your PC is by no means a dinosaur. How long since XP was installed / reinstalled ?

[junkmalle]

Check your drives' DMA settings.

[sdsumike619]

How do I do that?

[junkmalle]

Right click on My Computer, select Manage, Device Manager, IDE ATA/ATAPI Controlers. Double click on Primary IDE Channel, Advanced Settings tab. Make sure Transfer Mode is set to DMA If Available and that Current Transfer Mode is set to DMA something, not PIO something. Do the same for the Secondary IDE Channel. If your drives are using DMA then that is not the source of your problem.

If you can't change to a DMA mode from the device manager, uninstall the driver (on the Driver tab, not the Advanced Settings tab) and reboot. Windows will reinstall the driver and usually will enable DMA.

[sdsumike619]

In the primary, everything was DMA,,, in the seconday, device 0 was PIO only , and the current transfer mode for that one says PIO Mode, but there's no option to change the current transfer mode, unless i'm supposed to reboot after changing the transfer mode dropt down?

[harley2ride]

In device manager, uninstall your primary and secondary ide's, and reboot. They should come up in the correct mode after rebooting. Sometimes (especially with cheap media), read/write errors seem to make the drives revert to pio mode.

[junkmalle]

In the primary, everything was DMA,,, in the seconday, device 0 was PIO only , and the current transfer mode for that one says PIO Mode, but there's no option to change the current transfer mode, unless i'm supposed to reboot after changing the transfer mode dropt down?

The primary channel is probably your hard drive(s). The secondary channel is likely your DVD writer. If uninstalling the driver and rebooting doesn't get it into DMA mode then check the ribbon cable that connects it to the motherboard -- make sure it's an 80 conductor cable, not 40. You can usually count the wires in the ribbon (not the connector -- the connector is the same for both). Presumably your hard drives are connected with 80 wire cable so you can compare to that.

[redwudz]

PIO mode could be the problem. I would also take a look at the Task Manager when burning. If you are using close to 100% CPU, that will really slow things down.

Check it after resetting your drive to DMA mode also. There may be something else running in the background that is dragging down the response times.

Actually, I uninstall the channel, not the drivers. Primary or Secondary. After a reboot, the OS will replace them and hopefully set them to DMA. You should have no drives in PIO mode. If they don't reset, then it gets a little more complicated.

[MysticE]

I just got the newest version of Nero - is it normal for the computer response time to be verrrrrrrrrrrrry slow while burning a DVD?? Can't really seem to do much of anything while a DVD is burning, e.g. click the button to minimize a window and it takes several seconds to respond. Does this happen to everyone? Is there a way to have that not happen?

That's just the way it is for me with Nero and MainConcept encoder. I would imagine if you checked in Task Manager you would see cpu usage is pegged at 100%. Newer faster systems with dual core processors will help immensely.

[AUMusicNerd]

Easy way to take care of this. I know in Nero 6, when you go to start burning the DVD, there's a check box you can check that will select the system priority for burning the DVD, if you select a low priority, Nero won't use as much of your RAM, if you select high prioriy, Nero will use as much RAM as it can. It usually defaults to the high setting.