For whatever reason one of the CD/DVD burners an LG GSA-H22N that I use which is fairly new and I have never had any problems with before has all of a sudden stopped working correctly and I first noticed this when it was failing to copy music to CD's properly and would copy a couple few songs and then eject the disk saying that it could not complete the process. I then tried cleaning it with a cleaning CD which plays some music during the cleaning and it would skip through the selections and then say that windows media player was unable to play the disk in digital and suggested using analog, I finally tried installing the firmware for the CD/DVD burner and then it worked absolutely fine although after turning the computer off and then restarting it the next morning it was back to square one again and the CD/DVD burner no longer worked correctly again, my question is what keeps deleting the firmware setting and how can I prevent it or is the CD/DVD burner most likely going bad? Thank you.

If you are actually updating the drive firmware I doubt it is going away over night. Either there is a software (non firmware) issue or you may have something like a defective cable. Burners require an 80 wire IDE cable to operate properly. If you have a different 80 wire cable change it out. If the drive is SATA then check the data cable connection. There have been reports of some working loose. I don't use WMP so I am not sure about current versions but Windows is big on DRM (Digital Rights Management). If you don't have proper ownership of a file WMP may balk at playing it. As far as the copying stopping short goes, that could be caused by overheating of the drive.

Yeah I thought that was weird to lose the firmware setting from a restart the next morning, the cables are new so I don't think that is the issue and they are properly seated. Apparently after your inquiry of the DRM settings, I recalled shutting down several plugins to Firefox 3 because of slow down issues trying to resolve the problem, of which some were DRM related and after re-enabling them now everything works fine so either that or some of the other plugins were causing the issue, so thank you for that help. While on the topic, Firefox 3 has performed outstandingly well except for the fact that sometimes it will slow way down unexplainably which seems to be an issue with Firefox 3 and I have tried disabling features such as plugins etc and clearing the console to no avail, any suggestions? Thank you.

There are lots of reasons an optical drive may not work correctly, or may not burn a disk correctly. "...what keeps deleting the firmware setting..." It's not being deleted. If the original firmware worked fine before, the problem was not caused by the firmware. The firmware data is stored on a read-only flashable chip on the optical drive's board. Same as the data on the read-only part of your mboard's bios chip (which also has a changable cmos portion), it does not change unless you deliberately flash the firmware chip with a different version of the firmware. The firmware version you flashed it with is still there. You problem(s) were before, and are now, caused by something else. All optical drives are somewhat sensitive regarding which media - brands and types of burnable disks - you use with them. The drives work fine with some or most media, but do not work fine with other media. There are usually lists of which media the drives are known to work fine with on the manufacturer's web site in the info for the model, and sometimes there are also reviews of the drive model on the web in which they have tested the drive with various media, and there may be lists of drive models a particular brand's media is known to work fine in on the web site of the media manufacturer. Firmware updates sometimes improve that situation, but usually only for a few specific types and brands of media. The quality control of the disks can be a significant factor. If you buy a stack of disks cheaply in bulk, no cases included, there are likely to be a greater percentage of defective disks. Use the test-before-you-burn settings in your burning software to weed out those defective disks. Assuming you used the same media to burn to before and after you flashed the firmware, and that media works fine with the drive, you probably have a problem caused by software or other settings in Windows. You should not install more than one burning program at a time, other than the basic CD burning one that's built into XP. They often have one, or a few, module(s) that run(s) all the time, such as something that checks all optical disks inserted to see whether they are burnable, and that or those modules can interfere with the other burning program(s). If you DO have more than one burning program installed, that might explain why your problem returned after you flashed the firmware and rebooted. If you are using Nero software, some systems don't get along with Nero's - InCD feature - ImageDrive feature - if you don't know what that is, most more recent Nero software suites have it - search for Imagedrive in this: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/help/libs... You may be able to un-install it or them in Add/Remove Programs if it/they are listed separately, and/or by changing something in Nero's configuration or Properties, or by un-installing Nero and installing it again using a Custom installation, and choosing to NOT install it/them. If you are using an older burning software version, older than about 2 years, they often cannot work correctly after IE 7 has been installed, and/or after Windows Media Player 11 has been installed. If you un-install IE 7 and go back to using 6.x, or go back to a previous WMP version, they work fine. Rarely, filter settings for the drive can get butchered. Look in Device Manager. If there are yellow ? marks beside any optical drive's model number, you may need to remove some upper and/or lower filter related lines from the registry, if they are present. ..... Possible physical or electronic things that could be wrong with the drive, that could cause constant or intermittant problems. Bearing wear... This is the main reason no optical drive has had a warranty for longer than a year for a long time now. The thing that usually happens first after you have used the drive a lot that causes a drive to have problems is the sleeve bearings (I've never seen or heard of a drive that has better than sleeve bearings) in the drive's motor have deteriorated to the point there is too much friction in them, and the drive can then no longer spin a disk at the max rated speed, and eventually, it will not be able to spin a disk at even the minimum 1X (the original Audio CD standard) speed, and eventually the motor may not spin at all. In the first stages of that you will have intermittant problems. Later on, Windows and your bios won't recognize any disk in the drive at all because it can't even spin at 1X speed. If the drive is IDE connected, the data cable may have a problem or be damaged. It is common to un-intentionally damage IDE data cables, especially while removing them - the 80 wire ones are more likely to be damaged. What usually happens is the cable is ripped at either edge and the wires there are either damaged or severed, often right at a connector or under it's cable clamp there, where it's hard to see - if a wire is severed but it's ends are touching, the connection is intermittant, rather than being reliable. Another common thing is for the data cable to be separated from the connector contacts a bit after you have removed a cable - there should be no gap between the data cable and the connector - if there is press the cable against the connector to eliminate the gap. 80 wire data cables are also easily damaged at either edge if the cable is sharply creased at a fold in the cable. Try another data cable if in doubt. By the way, any DVD combo drive capable of burning 16X or greater DVD +R or DVD -R disks is capable of UDMA 66, and if it is IDE connected, it must be connected to an 80 wire data cable in order to work properly. Both of those things will cause data errors while using the drive. If those errors exceeed a threshold, Windows (2000 and up) will force the drive into a lesser PIO mode, which has a much slower max speed. If the errors continue, Windows will add lines in the Registry that force the drive to run in PIO mode no matter what you do. You can remove those lines, but if you don't correct the problem that caused it, the drive will be running in PIO mode again immediately, or in a short time. Burning software usually cannot work correctly if the drive is in PIO mode, if it even recognizes the drive as a burner drive. To check to see which mode the drive is in, see this: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devic... If the connection your optical drive is on is in PIO mode, try setting it to DMA if available, save settings, go back in, see if it has changed to a higher mode. DVD combo burner optical drives should be in Ultra DMA mode 4, if they are capable of 16X or greater DVD + or DVD - . If the drive won't go out of PIO mode, you need to remove some lines from the Registry NOTE: if you have an Intel chipset, you may not see any Advanced Settings there in Device Manager in the properties for the drive controllers. In that case, if the IAA (Intel Application Accelerator) software is loaded, you have a IAA entry in your Programs list, and the speeds the drives are in are shown when you run that. DVD combo drives (burn and read both CDs and DVDs) have a least two lasers and associated circuits. We've heard of cases where one has malfunctioned after the drive has been used a lot. However, in that case, it can never read or burn some disks after that happens. ....... Failing power supplies are common and can cause your symptoms. Check your PS. See response 4 in this: http://www.computing.net/hardware/w... E.g. Burning a disk, particularly burning a DVD, places an additional load on your system - in the case of burning a DVD it's a lot more of a load, more than almost any other software. If the PS is not capable or no longer capable of handling that demand for the extra load properly, the burning program may experience errors, it may quit burning before it's finshed a burning session, or in the worst cases, the computer may immediatly black screen and reboot when you attempt to use the burning software. ..... I like LG drives myself. LG drives are generally good drives, well balanced, relatively quieter, but one weakness they often have is they are not as good as some other drives at reading scratched disks - their error correction isn't as good.

Mercury Try a different player. I use Winamp myself for MOST things. If you install Winamp pay close attention to the install screens. There are many add ons that are checked by default. I don't install any of them myself.

Also, try a different power cable.