Help please! New here with sloooow burner

[onestell]

Hey guys ... I have a Compaq Presario V2000. My questions is two fold. The other day, I started having trouble with dvd/cd playback on the machine, and at around the same time burning capabilities slowed to a crawl (3hrs to do a dvd) ... any ideas what I can do to fix this? I am a novice to computers so please go gently on me!

 

[tipstir]

How much RAM?
Free HDD Space?
What software are you using?
How fast is the DVDRW you're burning on?
How you cleaned the drive using CD/DVD disc cleaner?
Get a can of dust remover spay while you're at it..
Make sure you using AC electric power and not DC (battery power)

Expect anywhere from 2 to 4hrs to burn on to a dvd if your using HQ/SP.. That goes for some desktop systems beside laptops. Make sure you turn off any AV/Spyware and don't download or surf the internet while that's going on. Don't load the screen saver either..

 

[mikeusru]

Hey onestell, i've had this problem before. I don't know if the cause is the same, but what happened to me is that the DVD burner switched to PIO mode. There are two modes which DVD burners and hard drives can be read through, and they are DMA mode (this is what you want) and PIO mode (no - this is slow!). there are many weird reasons for why something might switch into PIO mode so you might wanna check this:
right click on "my computer" and hit go to properties. Go to the Hardware tab, and open the device manager. once you're there, hit the plus sight on the IDE/ATA/ATAPI controllers, and right click on the primary/secondary IDE channels, selecting "properties". hit the "Advanced settings" tab, and for Transfer mode, make sure "DMA if available" is selected for both device 0 and device 1. it will tell you if it's working in "current transfer mode"

See if this works (you'll need to restart after changing the options).
Also let me know how many hard drives and cd/dvd drives you have, and if you have a dell computer (somehow this is an ongoing problem with them).
mikeusru