My burner died?

[paardje]

After years of service and fun, my burner probably died! It only can give the error: Power Calibration Error. It will pick up S O M E disks of another brand (mostly 2 from a stack of 10!) but it just won't burn...

I tried to muck out the lens with a cleaning disc of brand Hama: no success

Blowing in the drive to remove dust *cough! cough!*: no success

Tried another burning prog: no success (I use Nero 7 and Deep Burner, both gives errors)

Tried to READ data from a disk: Successfully..........

I also have another reader in my rig but it's too darn slow!

Can anyone HELP me?

 

[InsaneNutter]

The laser in the drive is probably going, my DVD writer is 5 years old now and it refuses to burn CD-R’s however it will burn DVDR’s and DVD+DL’s perfectly.

Luckily DVD writers are cheap now, I think mine was £80 back at Christmas 2004 when I got it

 

[paardje]

Well, here a small update and I do not know how this is possible but everything's working again. My drive takes CD's and DVD's again! Yay!

 

[Icharus_Falling]

ive had this happen with several burners, it is not uncommon. although, i must point out that if your power source is going bad, it can cause the burner to sometimes work and sometimes not work.

either way, new dvd burners are like $30 on newegg, and the price of power sources has skyrocketed in the past few years. 5+ years ago, you couldnt pay more than $50 for a power supply, now they have them for $1k!!! =/

 

[BonezOz]

My suggestion? I'll do this if and when my drive finally fails, is to buy a Blue-Ray combo drive, one that can read Blue-Ray, but writes to everything else.

 

[paardje]

My old PC can't handle Blu Ray. If you try that, my PC will surely EXPLODE! Haha! (I only have 2 GB internal mem.)

 

[Trebor]

2GB would be fine for playing Blu-Ray content. What really matters is the CPU and graphics card you have (new graphics cards boast how they can help a PC play HD content by processing some of the information instead of having the CPU do all the work). Your best best would be to have a good dual core CPU. Some useful info here: Minimum System Requirements to Watch 1080p Movies - Blu-ray Forum

 

[Titcher]

Nice work stepping in there Trebor, don't want people getting the illusion of needing tonnes of RAM for everything. Reminds me of a guy I know who bought 8GB of RAM for "gaming".

 

[Trebor]

Nice work stepping in there Trebor, don't want people getting the illusion of needing tonnes of RAM for everything. Reminds me of a guy I know who bought 8GB of RAM for "gaming".

I hope you showed him the error of his ways. I'd say 4GB is the most a PC should require these days. Heck you can only utilise that if you have a 64bit operating system. Good thing about working in IT is that you learn these things. I feel sorry for the average PC user who might not have a clue .