Should You Burn CD's while Doing Other Stuff With Your PC?

I always used to stop what I was doing when I had dialup to burn CD's because I was worried about coasters. Now I have cable and it's inconvient to stop. My burner is also just 4x and so therefore I have to waste a lot of my time just to burn CD's (particularly as I now burn more because of broardband.)

What do you guys say? Is it better to stop or not?

BTW, I have only a 400 98se box and 128mb. Money is tight atm, so can't afford to upgrade.

Thanks

In your case I would suggest that when you are burning a CD you stop everything else.

The lates burners with Burn-proof (or similar techniques), SCSI burners and more powerful systems are able to burn and perform other tasks at the same time.

just try it and know it....
when you try it use a cdrw so if it fails you don't screw up a cdr!
goodluck!

There was something about this mention a while back ago. I have a old dinosaur that is sat aside for burning pc's. It is a old 200mmx hunk of crap, but it works flawless if I dont use the machine for other things. But the 750 works with no problem and I do all kinds of crap while burning, but you can experiment and see

Thanks for your replies.

I have been experimenting. I burnt 5 CD's tonight. All seem to be okay.
I had two/three ftp sessions going as well as Zonealarm and DUMeter.
I used Nero and CDRWin.
Happy it went well. I did CD's or rar's, mpeg's and an ISO. So all bases covered I guess.

I've got a K6-2 450 MHZ and a 4x burner too, i allways play songs in winamp, got some internet explorer sessions, icq's running, virusscan, firewall, programs like kazaa, and sometimes outlook, and no problems at all, but there's 1 "but".... you do have to use win2k, win98 can't handle it and i think it will crash, maybe you should consider a dual boot system?

Greetzzz...
ZKHbaldo

Usually as long as there is no major disk access, such as opening a new IE windows or copying files from drive to drive as well as trying to burn then most of the time its ok, I have a PIII 866 Xeon 512RDram, 6!!!(I know it is excessive) HD ranging from 9.1 LVD SCSI to 60 GB ide and only when I am doing major stuff will I have a problem, I also run windows 2000 and would recomment taking the leap, now most (I bite my fingernails everyday) of the bugs are out and with limited directx8 support it runs most recent games. See how you go, I undestand money is tight but memory is also really dam cheap (on another forum message somebody was quoted $79 for 512MB!!!)

I have a nice old dell xpsr350 and i'm usually on the net while burning. don't often get a lot of coasters, but the less I do while burning, the fewer coasters I get.

best thing is not to overload your processor as that is what usually kills any burns for me.....

You're in the grey zone, I'd say.

When I was on my AMD K6-450 I'd take care not to do too much funny stuff.
If I'd be printing and burning, I'd watch the writer buffer very carefully and when the gauge was at 20% or so I'd pause printing untill it was up to a 100% and then continue printing again.
Scanning (SCSI scanner) and burning is pretty easy as long as I don't use a busmaster SCSI controller (one of my burnproof burners is a Sanyo SCSI BP3 burner) If I use my new Adaptec busmaster SCSI controller my whole system freezes while scanning:mad:
Nowadays (Thunderbird 1.4 Ghz, 512 Mb RAM, RAID controller, Burnproof burners) I only take care not to visit pirate's sites 'coz often they open windows that cannot be closed other then typing Alt Ctrl Del and click "end task" This wil probably generate a coaster (haven't tried it though).

Keep 'em burnin'

• Alpha. Software undergoes alpha testing as a first step in getting user feedback. Alpha is Latin for "doesn't work."
• Beta. Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is Latin for "still doesn't work."

I always do other stuff while I'm burning a CD. Surfing, Dnet cow, games, photoshop etc. I got a Plexwriter 16x, on an AMD Thunderbird 1,4 GHz with 512 meg RAM. I've had no problems with it so far.

Lil update...

I must have burned 20 CDS since I first posted the question. It's fine as long as all I have open are ftp sessions, Zonealarm and DUMeter.

If I open anything else and try to burn at the same time I get a BSOD.