need help with Sonic DLA

[tekmage]

We have Sonic DLA that came with a Thinkpad X40 - but it works intermittently. We have placed several calls to IBM to no avail. They don't even support it. Yet they stick it on the machine as a freebie utility.

We have since found out - thru long series of investigations
Veritas DLA became Sonic DLA. IBM rewraps or just renames it as IBM DLA.

The problem is that the DLA will work for 3 to 6 weeks and than suddenly stop working. Than quite astonishingly it will start working by itself again. We have the latest upgrades for Sonic DLA 4.95 and have upgraded the BIOS and the firmware on the Laptop.

We are using DLA to format CD-RWs and writing to the disk from various applications like word (save as) and excel. These work fine for like 3 to 6 weeks. NO the CD-RW's aren't full yet - but we do get errors stating the CD-RW will be formatted in the background (again). And than it would stop working.

It seems to me that there is still an interaction between regular win xp and the DLA - but for the life of me - We can't see any problems.
I get the feeling that inherently the software and Win XP have problems.
There are no other 3rd party software installed on the machine. NO NERO INCD or ROXIO DIRECT CD and IMAPI service is disabled.

Any suggestions or any help is greatly appreciated.

Robert

[Justin42]

Uninstall it.

Seriously.

Packet writing software is so inheirently flaky, as is CD-RW media, it's quite possible the discs themselves are going bad or something. If it works fine for a few weeks, then needs to reformat, repeat, etc, it would point to a strong likelihood of media..

I'd switch to USB thumb drives or the like for the kinds of things you're describing. They're not exactly pinnacles of reliability themselves but they work much smoother, and with less system-crashing software..

[burninfool]

I read a thread that said there is a problem with WinXP SP2 and Sonic DLA.
I agree with Justin42 uninstall it and try Windows burning software or use multi-session data.