Every now and then I like to be smart and backup some of my data to CDs. In a recent case (tonight), I was backing some stuff up for my in-laws (upgrading them from Win98 to XP). The CD burner I have is a MicroSolutions Backpack CD-RW with SpeedyCD software. Usually, it all works well and good (although the SpeedyCD UI is just plain crappy). That was until tonight. For some reason, the burner will get all the way to the end and then puke out on creating the table of contents for the disc, thus making the entire CD unusable. So I tried bumping down the burn rate. Same thing happens. I decrease the burn rate again. Same results. WTF?
If my burner is capable of burning at 16x, and the discs I have are capable of being burnt at 48x, what’s the problem? Why o why must I continue to burn CDs at 4x to get them to work? And I’m not just picking on my MicroSolutions Backpack. I’ve had several experiences just like this with other burners and burning software in the past. CD burners, to me, seem to be some of the most flaky pieces of computer hardware you can buy. Why is that? They’ve been around long enough. You’d think the manufacturers would have gotten this down to a science by now.
And can someone please explain to me why, when burning a CD, the burning process insists on hijacking every single resource my machine has? I mean, I can’t even surf the web or write this blog entry without serious hiccups, all because the burner decides it needs every ounce of CPU it can get. I understand there is a lot of low level stuff going on when burning CDs, but you’d think at this stage in the game, one of the manufacturers would have gotten smart enough to alleviate this problem. I mean, when they test this stuff out, don’t they feel the effects of this? Do they even test their burners while running other applications? I’m a multi-tasking sort of person, so sitting and waiting for my burner to fail so that I can try again 4 times seems like a waste to me. At least I should be able to write a blog entry bitching about the whole process. Is that too much to ask?
Print | posted on Sunday, March 14, 2004 9:00 PM