Shamus_McFartfinger

So do I. It's why I installed the latest and greatest gadget for my PC - a dribble tray that sits on top of the keyboard.

Good media. Not sure about the drive though. As I said above, uninstall your IDE controllers. The reason why can be found in the FAQ.

No idea. I can tell you that CDs I burned 10 years ago are still fine as are most DVDs I did 3 or 4 years ago. The ones that are failing are the ones you'd expect to fail like Princo, Longten and various other garbage media.

Hmm.... you haven't given us much to work with. A log from one of your recent burns would have been nice. That aside, the first thing I'd do is uninstall your IDE controllers within Device Manager and see if that fixes the problem. It certainly won't hurt.

*sigh* Some of the stuff I was looking at was really expensive. I guessed that it wouldn't be cheap but the price paid for the servers was staggering. $2500 each. I almost fell off my chair. To make matters worse, the auction noobie brigade turned up in force and blew out the price of laptops to within $150 of what I could buy one for brand new and the new ones have more stuff on them and are faster. They also blew out the price of 19" LCD monitors to within $50 of a new one. They were bidding on everything, even the scsi harddrives. Goddam idiots. They really piss me off.

Oh good. I see now how valuable my input is. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a rock to crawl under.

Computer auctions at this place are held every couple of weeks. There's some good stuff to be had if the noobies don't blow the prices out by bidding on damned near everything.

Well, the auctions are on again in a couple of days and I'm looking forward to buying something I suspect Mrs Shamus needs. She'd be thrilled if I bought her a rackmount server with 3TB of HD space. Or not. Going to have a look around tomorrow and head off to the auctions to buy something the day after. Check it out if you like here: http://www.baileysauctions.com.au/c/catalogue_c.htm The things I'm going to be looking at are items 5213, 5351-5355, 5506 and 5509. I love shopping.

Again, I can't see the point. (I did see L_UKs reply but I'm stubborn so I'll argue anyway). For highly intensive processes that use bucketloads of CPU time like video rendering or video compression that can take hours or days, by all means. For something that takes less than ten minutes at 5 to 10 percent cpu capacity? Why bother? <Due to inflation the 2c slot has been removed. Please insert 5c to continue>

There's mixed reviews regarding Imation media. Some good. Some bad. Stick with the Verbs if you can. Even if you did kill your drive what's the worst that it can be to replace? 30 or 40 dollars? It's not worth losing sleep over. All bullshit aside and regardless of what "the experts" say, computers are pretty robust. Unless a heatsink falls off your cpu (which doesn't matter on the newer Pentium 4s anyway as it detects the temperature change and automatically lowers the voltage which stops it from frying), or your PSU sets fire to the crud collected by your case fans because you don't clean them out - you'll be fine. (I once threw an Amiga 500 into my neighbours' swimming pool and left it there for a few days because ...... well....... it was pissing me off. After drying it out and replacing the floppy drive it was fine). Under normal conditions you can't hurt them. You might kill the operating system and have to re-install it but something serious has to go wrong (like a power surge or failed case fan) before you damage the PCs components or the PC itself. EDIT: You can never have too many case fans. <Obi-Wan Kenobi mode off>

I'm with Grain. The verify process takes 5 minutes or so, yeah? Even during a burn the CPU is lucky to peak at more than 25% when the DMA settings are correct. Now we want to slow down a process that uses even less than that? Personally, I can't see the point. <radical opinion mode off. Please insert 2c to continue>

Cool. Hopefully, this'll be a project over the holidays.

Your log appears in the bottom window of ImgBurn. It shows us alot about what is going on, your drive, media and that sort of stuff. When you have a problem, just copy and paste the log with your question or reply. This is an old one of mine so you can see what we're talking about.

Agreed. BTW, how many PSUs have you got in your Lian Li case? Is there room for 2?

10 disks a day? I think we can safely say you're not overworking your drive. Lightning gave us a task a few weeks ago to burn some re-writable media using a batchfile. Simply put, what we did was put a disk into the drive, pick an ISO and add it to a batchfile via the command line. What it then did was burn the ISO then spit the disk out and burn it again and spit the disk out and burn it again and spit the disk out and burn (get the picture)? I left it running overnight and after some ridiculous amount of burns (dozens and dozens of them) I stopped mine running. My drive is still fine.

Read above carefully, Grasshopper. Verbatim -R are fine. Verbatim -R/DL are a bit dodgy.

1. Your drive will defragment better IF it has more free space. The window defragmenter will not even do anything unless a drive has 20% free space. 2. Buy Perfect Disk 8.0, it's 100 times better than what you get from Microsoft. P.S. - I do not work for them. 1. Good try but that ain't the problem. I freed up about 90gig on that drive before trying again without any success. The Windows defrag util just won't touch it. 2. Perhaps you're right. Still, it's not a drive I'm all that worried about as it's just used as a shared dumping ground for files before they're moved elsewhere or burned to disk. It has to be 3 years since I started using it and even being fragmented as badly as it is, it's still a very quick drive even though it's an old PCI 133 controller.

Firmware is firmware. External and internal drives are identical. They just have a different way of communicating with the rest of your system. Verbatims are brilliant. No bad burns, errors etc. They are very good media (except for the -R/DL media). They can be a bit dodgy. Firmware is the internal software of your drive. Without it, your drive is a doorstop. It is what controls your drive. Things like supported media speeds for your blank DVDs are directly controlled by your firmware. Updating your firmware will often fix bugs in the drive or add new features to it. EDIT: The other media you were asking about (Taiyo Yuden) are the best of the best. If you can find them, grab them.

Agreed. If given the option of using OPTODISC media or nailing my testicles to a wall, I'd be wanting someone to pass me a hammer.

Polo seems upset today. I think he needs a group hug.

<linux rant on> I love linux. Although, after playing with it (linux, that is) for a couple of years now I'm still very much a learner. Secondly, your teacher is an idiot. Half of the internet runs on linux servers. Contrary to popular belief, the world doesn't revolve around Windows. Nor does Windows have anything to do with IP addressing, subnets and all that other geeky gobbledegook. It may provide or host such things but Windows must use the same TCP/IP protocols that were standardised in the late 60s/early 70s as everyone else. It has to adhere to standards that were dreamt up long before Windows was even thought of. I use Mandriva linux on a PC here and have a thingy called SMB4k running on it which allows for easy networking to shared Windows drives. The operating systems may be different but the protocols they use to talk to each other must, obviously, be the same. <linux rant off>

I like stories. I was just curious. It will *not* defrag. I just moved another 70gigs off it and it won't play the game. It's a raid drive on an old 133 PCI card. Dunno what the hell is wrong with it.

I love a happy ending.

I guessed that, as subtle as it was.

Because it's free? The new version watermarks the video unless you cough up the dollars for it. Quite possibly, Oh, Great and Terrible Bwana. Still, I've never had a good look around their site to see what they offer beyond DivXtoDVD. The market for converting legitimate video files to DVD format can't be that big.