Urgent help needed please

Hi All,

I'm new to this forum and i urgently seek your expert advice on an issue thats killing me.

here are my specs:

Im running windows vista rtm 6.0

motherboard:intel dg965ry
cpu: intel dual core 3.4ghz
ram: transcend 1 gb ram.
os: vista home premium rtm.
nero: 7.8.5.0 (latest one with vista support)


my problem:

Installation was perfect no issues.

when trying to copy a DVD the speed begins at 9x and I am able to work on other applications simultaneously and cpu meter shows 61% in the sidebar.

slowly the speed increases to 16x and then the problem starts..the cpu meter shows 96% and the systems hangs and im not able to use other applications.only after the "enter blank dvd to write to" messagae appears and the dvd pops out the system returns to normal.

does that mean that when running nero in vista i cannot simultaneously use other applications until nero finishes its job,unlike in xp where i would burn dvds and also play games at the same time.


please help me im dying for an answer.


Thanks in advance,

Binavijay.

Welcome to the forum Binavijay.

What Nero function are you using? If it's Recode then it will be CPU intensive.

I use nero express to copy a movie dvd.i never use recode.

thanks for ur early reply.

can anyone lend me a solution??

If you're doing a disc to disc then you might want to re-consider that as any read error on the input disc will waste a blank disc.

It's far safer to copy to the HDD first & burn from there.

Anyway you might want to check the DMA status of your drives , both HDD & optical. Don't have Vista so not quite sure whether that's changed from XP or not. Have a look at this thread that covers the XP side of things.

Thanks TimC for your efforts and answers but i always copy first to hard disk and then to blank dvd.

my problem is that im not able to use other application while nero is working.perhaps nero uses all the memory and hence im not able to run other applications.eventhough the system hangs it automatically becomes normal after the dvd is burned and the dvd quality too is outstanding.only problem is i cant run ohther jobs when nero is burning and until it finishes.perhaps i need to increase my RAM to 2 GB.would that help???

but when i had xp i had no trouble running nero and other applications at the same time and the sytem was blazing fast eventough nero wa running on one side.

Have you checked the DMA status of the devices?

the DMA status shows ultra DMA mode 4 on the channel.

What about the hard drive DMA status?

And also how much free space & when did you last defrag the drive & do you have compression switched on for it?

I do not know how to check the hard drive DMA status.

The total hard drive capacity is 160gb(seagate maxtor)
The C drive (primary partition) is 20 gb and after vista installation it is 11.5 gb free.
I have not defragmented the drive even once because i installed vista only 3 days back.Its ok TimC please dont trouble yourself in answering my stupid question.I will try to call some hardware engineer and see whats wrong.Thanks a lot for your valuable suggestions and help.

I don't give up too easily I'm afraid.

Firstly you check the hard drive DMA in exactly the same way as you did with the burner.

I think the problem might be down to the partitioning. What happens is that access to the system partition is almost constant and when burning from the other partition on that same physical drive the read heads have to keep switching back & forth between the partitions. This can slow the process very considerably. I notice that on my system which runs XP where I have a system partition - done to ease backups - and a general storage partition. Copying to & from that other partition to one of my other drives is noticeably slower than I'd expect.

If you're low on free memory Vista will keep writing & reading from the paging file so the system will be very slow.

Thanks TimC.I will try doing the DMA status check today at home and let you know tomorrow of any improvements.Thanks again for your interest in my issue.

thanks TimC!!! Your DMA tool worked perfectly and now im able to work with nero in vista as i would in XP.Thanks a lot for your support,I am very grateful to you!!!

Excellent news.