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When does you Used read buffer start depleting when burning

Never, not unless my hard drive is taxed. And taxing it takes skill, it isn't easy to do.

If you have a slow 500mhz PC your buffer might go up and down due to the fact your CPU is working harder to send the info from the Hard Drive to your CD-RW drive. On my 1200 Athlon the only thing that drops the buffer on my PC is when its burning a CD-R from the hard drive and another program starts to load up.

When I was using my 4x and 12x drives I would shut programs down like ICQ, IE and anything else that was running, otherwise I could get a coaster. But CD-RW burners have gotten so much better with buffer underrun protection I dont worry as much about shutting them down. I have been in chat rooms with Mirc and burning CD-R's at the same time.

I was burning a CD with Nero and a freind on ICQ messaged me - the box popped up - my buffer went from 100% down to around 90% but my Lite-On quickly took care of it and the CD turned out fine.

I think that i am suffering from not enough memory if i had to assume that was the problem. While looking in task manager last night i noticed every time the page file got hit the buffer would drop dangerously low. the only way my page file should be accessed is if i run into a condition where and parts of my ram have to written to disk to make room, so this is why i think I am seeing this condition. Anyone else have any input

How much memory does your PC have? The more the better!

Even if I set the Nero buffer size to max, I can deplete it and cause a coaster if I'm burning AND doing a video capture simultaneously.

128 MB or ram and i have minimal programs running at the time of the burn

128MB RAM and what are the rest of your computer specs?

850 mhz duron
Windows xp sp1
64 Ati radeon 7500
samsung 48*24*48*16
Sony Cd-rom 52x
c:\ 10 gig partition
f: drive 30 gig partion running windows software raid

A Duron 850 with 128MB RAM should be fine. The only other thing that could be bogging down the buffer is your hard drive speed. Is it 5400 or 7200 RPM and how fast is the IDE port set to? Look in your Bios or in Windows under Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager, IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers for the speed that the port is set at. You should see either Multi-word DMA Mode 2, Ultra DMA Mode 2, Ultra DMA Mode 3, Ultra DMA Mode 4, Ultra DMA Mode 5, or Ultra DMA Mode 6.

TheWizard wrote:A Duron 850 with 128MB RAM should be fine. The only other thing that could be bogging down the buffer is your hard drive speed. Is it 5400 or 7200 RPM and how fast is the IDE port set to? Look in your Bios or in Windows under Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager, IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers for the speed that the port is set at. You should see either Multi-word DMA Mode 2, Ultra DMA Mode 2, Ultra DMA Mode 3, Ultra DMA Mode 4, Ultra DMA Mode 5, or Ultra DMA Mode 6.

They are Ultra Ata 100 drives and they are running at that. Also they are 7200 rpm drives. Looking at the task manager while running simulations I can see the windows resizing my swap file or using all of the available swap file. I also noticed that when this happens the processor is running at 100% usage. I have combed through device manager and the bios to make sure that everything dealing with the HD is enabled and all related stuff is set to run at optimal settings.

Processor running at 100%? That can't be good, not for merely burning things. Maybe it is time to invest in more RAM since I can't think of anything else holding you back. RAM is cheap now, so you shouldn't have a hard time finding some. http://www.newegg.com is always a good place to start, http://www.pricewatch.com is good for price comparisons, and if you look hard enough and are patient for a good deal to roll around http://www.ebay.com is great.

I want to add another RAM store: OEMPCWorld