CD Burner Update
Just an update on my computer, for anyone who might be remotely interested :)
First off, thanks to everyone who gave me some advice on fixing my little situation. However, this issue turned out to be something not even I expected.
After I tried several configurations in Nero, winamp, sound card, etc with no avail I began googling for any advice I could find. What I found out was this: Apparently, if your optical drive has enough misread, bad writes, etc. Windows decides that the drive doesn't work right and switches the drive out of DMA mode and into PIO. Now, I have no idea what "PIO mode" actually is, but apparently it's an older transfer mode that slows everything down and uses up a TON of system resources. That's exactly what happened to me. Unfortunately, Windows wasn't letting me manually switch the drive back into DMA mode so I had to go the extreme route. I had to uninstall the ATA controller drivers (and the IDE channel AND the optical drive) and let Windows re-detect them. And viola! Now I can actually burn a CD in under 15 minutes AND do whatever else I want at the same time. Running Nero alone my CPU usage was peaking at 91% in PIO mode now it's barely hitting 25%.
Wow, that was so much technobabble my mind hurts.
First off, thanks to everyone who gave me some advice on fixing my little situation. However, this issue turned out to be something not even I expected.
After I tried several configurations in Nero, winamp, sound card, etc with no avail I began googling for any advice I could find. What I found out was this: Apparently, if your optical drive has enough misread, bad writes, etc. Windows decides that the drive doesn't work right and switches the drive out of DMA mode and into PIO. Now, I have no idea what "PIO mode" actually is, but apparently it's an older transfer mode that slows everything down and uses up a TON of system resources. That's exactly what happened to me. Unfortunately, Windows wasn't letting me manually switch the drive back into DMA mode so I had to go the extreme route. I had to uninstall the ATA controller drivers (and the IDE channel AND the optical drive) and let Windows re-detect them. And viola! Now I can actually burn a CD in under 15 minutes AND do whatever else I want at the same time. Running Nero alone my CPU usage was peaking at 91% in PIO mode now it's barely hitting 25%.
Wow, that was so much technobabble my mind hurts.