How to Solve the Weirdest PC Mysteries

CD-RW Secrets

I remember when flying-disc sightings led to frantic calls to the FBI. Today, silvery circular objects hurtling through the air typically come from angry music fans frustrated by balky CD-RW drives. Here are my fixes.

Musical Malady

Mystery: You can play mind-blowing audio CDs on your CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive but not your CD-RW drive.

Solved: The audio signal from the drive playing a music CD passes through your sound card via a small cable. Chances are, your CD-RW drive doesn't have one of these cables. Also, your sound card may have only one connector for audio input. >>TIP To play audio CDs from either drive, you'll need a Y-cable (available at consumer electronics stores) that splits a single line into two, as a telephone-line splitter does, so that you can connect both drives' sound cables to the sound card. Or you can get a sound card with two ports.

CD-RWs Are From Mars...

Mystery: Your CD-RW drive stops halfway though a recording session, displays a "buffer underrun" error message, and leaves you with a useless CD. What's the matter? Doesn't that blankity-blank drive like Slim Whitman's music?

Solved: Many older CD-RW drives need an uninterrupted flow of data to write to CD-R discs. If the data stream runs dry even for a second, the process terminates and the target CD becomes unusable.

The easy but expensive solution is to buy a new CD-RW drive armed with technology that protects discs from buffer underrun errors. >>TIP Or follow my cheap method: Lower the drive's write speed in your CD-burning software. The drive will work at a slower pace, but you'll eliminate buffer underruns.

>>TIPAnother approach is to maximize data flow to the CD-RW drive by reducing the CPU workload. Log off your network and close all open applications. If you're moving data from your CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive to your CD-RW drive, consider copying the data to the hard drive first; hard drives move data faster than CD-ROM drives do. To optimize the hard drive, run Windows' ScanDisk and Disk Defragmenter; both utilities are in Start, Programs ( All Programs in XP), Accessories, System Tools.

>>TIP If your CD-RW drive is connected to your PC via the EIDE bus (as most internal drives are), make sure it's not attached to the same IDE cable as your hard drive. Most PCs come with two IDE channels. Each channel can have its own cable that supports two drives.