I have never been so frustrated in my life with a cd burner. My girlfriend bought me the yamaha 20x 2200 cdrw for xmas. I am running wondows 2000. So I pop in my new drive and burn my first cd... My goodness my system slowed down to a crawl. So, I figured out that dam was not enabled under the ide controller settings. So I enabled it not thinking much about it. After trying to burn again, my system crashes saying something aobut "begining physical memory dump". And my computer restarted.... And when it got to windows boot up screen (the one that says built on nt tech ect) it displayed the same eroor and rebooted and repeated this vicious cycle! So, I fricken reinstalled win 2k and was very pissed about it. I got it up and running and tried burning when low and behold, it happened again! But, this time I was able to get back in 2k. I immediately swicthed out the new burner for the acer old burner and did some burnings... everything was fine then on my last burn, WHAM, same error message. So I have come to determine that it was becasue I enabled dma that windows kept crashing. Anyways, I disable it, turn it to PIO mode and put back in my yamaha 20x. I tried burning at 20x and I get this error:
"WRITE ERROR - PADDING BLOCKS ADDED". I come to find, after searching the net, that this is a buffer underun for yamaha burners. So, I tried it at 16x... same problem. I try it at 12x and it finally goes. Not only does a burn speed of 12 x blow, but it slows my computer down alot. My mouse gets all jerky. I remember with my abit board and a p3 500 in win 98 with dma enabled, I could burn a cd and play half life at the saem time! What do I do with the problem here? Is this cd burner just junk? is there a way I can stop from getting buffer under runs at 20x? Here are my system specs below:

-ECS k7vza mainboard
-1.2 gig tbird under clocked to 1.08, fastest I could get my system w/o a lock up
- 512 megs of pr 133 cas 2 ram!
-On ide channel 1: 60 gig ibm deskstar and master and a 45 gig western digital as slave
- on ide channel 2: cdrw as master and cdrom as slave

Essentially what I want is to be able to burn cds while I do other things on my computer.. I am the epitomy of multitaskers. Would the tdk 24x burner be better? I figured with an 8 meg buffer here I couldnt lose. Sigh, so many questions, I hope someone can help! Thanks much!!!

You have a bad driver. I have similar problems, except my lockups are random. Nothing you can do but buy a DMA controller card (which I have not done yet). They are about $20 online.

haha. GEt your proper system board drivers for W2k silly ;}

GET THEM NOW.

And get SP1 for W2K.

Drivers people, windows don't got EVERYTHING in it's cab's. sheesh.