[TheMaskedm0m0]

"I have no idea about the buffer size of the writer. This will most probably sound silly, do CD burners have onboard memory? I thought they used memory for the buffer from the hard
drive?"

- Yes CD burners have onboard memory, generaly 2 or 4 meg buffers, once that buffer is drained, which is caused by activity on a hard drive that is on the same channel as the burner, like if you have WinAmp running or Windows is trying to access some files during the burn, you have buffer underrun, which is when the laser is going faster than the data being given to it or vice versa. Sometimes, programs like Easy CD Creator slow down the laser and data to prevent buffer underrun from occuring, while others like DiscJuggler do not have that feature.

Another good feature to have is BurnProof, it's not a program, but is physically built into your CD burner, all Plextors come with this. PoweRec is another good feature, like BurnProof, it too is built into the CD burner, I have only seen this on Plextors thus far. It assures high quality and consistent burns at any speed.

"I've tried closing down practically all programs and still have the same problem and have had loads of programs running on different occasions when I've had success at burning a game."

Still, it is good to have ALL non-system critical programs shut down. So if your in Windows 95/98/98SE when you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del all you should see is Explorer and Systray and whatever burning software you are using, other than that, End Task to everything else.

Another thing I suggest is getting X-teq System's X-Setup, a free download from their website. Somewhere within X-Setup Default UI, you can set it so that Windows uses up all available RAM before using a page or swap file (Like that huge Win386 file you see on your hard drive) RAM is incredibly faster than a swap file, plus no hard drive access, so once again limiting buffer underrun. I suggest you only do that if you have at least 128megs of RAM or more, with me and my 640megs, it is a tremendous increase in overall OS speed.

~The Masked M0M0~