I'm having trouble with my CD-rew. I don't know if its a Windows XP
issue, a Roxio version 5 Platinum one, the drive itself or the disk
that presented the problem.

I suspect it was the disk, as everything returned to normal after I
finally managed to eject it. I save my files daily, and leave "as is",
for subsequent top-ups, but today it trashed my system with barely an
error message. Is this not safe practice? Or was I unlucky with a
dodgy disk?

Also, I have a lap-top for emergency back-up which only has a CD-ROM:
how can I read "un-locked" disks in it?

Sorry, this sounds like two questions

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Request for Question Clarification by blader-ga on 22 Jul 2002 17:36 PDT

Dear cherry-ga:

I suspect it is the disk, but can you clarify on what exactly happened
to your system? What did you mean by "trashed?"

Best Regards,
blader-ga

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Clarification of Question by cherry-ga on 23 Jul 2002 06:02 PDT

all the short cuts associated with the drive were slow to respond, or
didn't respond, and the little hour-glass thing just hung around. Ctrl
Alt Del showed no applications running, but when I clicked "shutdown"
I got the "program not responding" message (the program was usually
Direct-CD, although once it was "ctfmon.exe").

Some other unrelated applications were also very slow to respond, but
did in the end. After an hour or so faffing about, including a
defragment, the Roxio main panel finnaly opened and I was able to
eject the CD. Everything seems back to normal now, although I've only
tried using rewritable disks.

I don't know what version of Roxio I have, apart from the name "Easy
CD Creator 5 Platinum"

Thankyou

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Clarification of Question by cherry-ga on 23 Jul 2002 15:09 PDT

More stuff.

Roxio version is Easy CD creator, 5 Platinum, version 5.1.0.209. I am
downloading the XP upgrade to version 5:1 now.

I will check out the Windows updates shortly.

CPU time. I'm not sure I got this right. The total usage at the moment
is 23 processess and 100% usage. There are 3 big ones (msimn.exe,
svchost.exe and IEesplore.exe) all at 13-15 hundred K. Then nothing
til the next clump of 3 using @7,000K (SETI@home,msmsgs.exe and
explorer.exe) and the rest are @ 1,000K or less.

This help is terrific! thankyou

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Clarification of Question by cherry-ga on 24 Jul 2002 14:03 PDT

More stuff about the CPU

I found the culpret! I use Collins dictionary/thesaurus whilst
working, and when its on, CPU use is 100%, when its off, its 1%! I'm
stunned that such a tiddler of a program could be so greedy! Its on
all the time usually, and doesn't seem to slow anything down.

In the "C..." column (with the dictionary off)"explorer.exe" is at
0-1, system idle was 97-99, and all the rest 0.

Hope this helps,

Roxio software is known to have issues with Windows XP, is this a
version that specifically states Windows XP compatability, or have you
updated it at the Roxio website?

I don't think it's a problem with the drive, but Windows XP does have
a problem with Direct CD, which I believe Roxio's CD writing software
installs.

Windows Update does have solutions to this problem, so if you haven't
done that yet, I would suggest you do so.

I looks like something uses too much CPU time.

Try [Ctrl-Alt-Delete] to open "Task Manager", and see the 'Processes'
tab.
Should be able to see which program uses more than 50 (%) CPU time
when that happened. Anything that got more than 50 (%) besides 'System
Idle Process' is bad. Write down that name(s) and post it here, so we
can see which particular application really bogged down XP.

For CPU time, I wrote the wrong column.
That was the 'Mem Usage' column, but the one I think would help to see
which application was the culprit was the 'CPU' column, on the left of
it.
Usually for inactive applications it will show as '00' while a good
healthy system will have between '90' to '98' for "System Idle
Process".

You said that the CPU was at '100' percent usage, which is actually
bad if you weren't doing anything special. Try to turn off or
uninstall "Seti@Home" for now, before looking at the overall CPU time
because Seti@Home might 'borrow' the rest of your CPU time. You can
just kill it by right click and 'End Process', or just assign a very
low priority for it.

Also, just in case something was hidden behind your user view, enable
the 'Show processes from all users' at the bottom.

Maybe to help seeing which applications/services use the CPU, you
might want to click the "CPU" column header to sort the view according
to CPU Time.

Let's see if these will point us to something.. :)

Ok, after you find which one uses most of your CPU time, try that CD
Program again. Before you run the CD application, just let Windows's
Task Manager's Processes open and ready for you to see. Now, run that
program again (try to duplicate your problem) and see which part of
that (or any) program steals your CPU Time. This way you can see if
Roxio's CD applications is the fault, or maybe just some part of it,
or maybe something else.

As another note, if you haven't, check your system with the latest
AntiVirus data. 'old' viruses usually didn't work well in XP
environment. Also, old AntiVirus data might get false positive on your
CD writer program which makes it slower because it tried to 'fix' it.

Also, about the CD itself, if the CD was 'broken', either physically
or on the data, the CD Drive might take forever to finally accepted
that your CD was 'broken'. Once I put a CD on my burner to read, but
it has a scratch around the first sector/lead-in area, and it makes my
burner crazy, (tried to read, almost got it but not really, then
repeat the process again). I can't eject the CD, so I have to restart
my machine and take out the CD before Windows read it again.. :)

hi, 

in my observation, Nero Burning ROM is much more compatible with XP.
You can download a trial version that works fully...

URL www.nero.com/en/download.htm 

warm regards
vinod