computer crashes when burning dvds

hi everyone,
if anyone can help advise me that would be awesome- i have an hp pavilion & i'm trying to burn avi files to dvd with nero 7- transcoding begins and somewhere between that and burning to disk the computer crashes & starts over. the odd time it will work and actually transcode and burn to my surprise. i'm curious if its bad ram or a device driver problem. the computer from the beginning of ownership has had problems but in the beginning i thought my downloading of bit torrents somehow i got a virus. almost anything i do- for example- click out of bit tornado, it will say 'blah blah has encountered a problem, it says this all the time. my biggest pain in the ***- like i said above-is crashing when i'm burning a dvd (doesn't do it when i burn an audio cd with nero) but also when i try to burn a dvd with 'sonic media' it crashes as well..if anyone can give me any pointers that would be great- i appreciate your time(even just to read all this.thanx Brent from Calgary, Canada

I would uninstall Sonic and Nero then reinstall only one of those programs and see if that helps, there might be a conflict. I would download CC Cleaner from here http://www.ccleaner.com/ and run Issues (the registry cleaner). Fix all issues found and give it a shot.

with the crashes you probably have some system file corruption. run system file checker by putting the xp cd in the drive, open a command prompt and type sfc /scannow Also check to make sure your DVD burner is operating in DMA mode and not PIO. look in device manager under IDE ATA|ATAPI Controllers. open the channel the drive is located on and check under the advanced tab.

thanx for the advice guys-- i'll try those things and get back to ya..thanx alot for your time...you rule..... brent