Is my DVD/CD burner kaput?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The last few projects I’ve worked on have ended up with tracks that make the DVD player freeze until I fast-forward to the next track. I played them on multiple players with the same results, at the same spots. Last night I had two projects abort themselves in the middle of burning, ruining two fresh DVDs.

It’s the burner that came with my Dell, so it’s not a high-end model by any means, but I’ve only had it for a little less than a year. On the other hand, I do burn A LOT of stuff and I know the lasers do wear themselves out eventually.

Is there a way to test it to see if it’s still viable and maybe just needs to be cleaned or something? I admit I haven’t cleaned it since I got it.

2

Certainly clean it - can’t hurt, might help.

If it’s less than a year old surely it’s still under warranty? Ask Dell what to do.

3

Warranty! Of course!

4

If you’re not already, try using better a better brand of media and seeing if that clears up the problem.

http://nomorecoasters.com/

I’ve had the best luck with Verbatim.

5

I just spent a bunch of time on the phone with Dell tech support (I got a very nice, competent guy, though clearly not a native English speaker) and we ran through a bunch of tests. He seems to think that I just got some bad DVDs. And thinking about it, I’m inclined to agree with him. I cracked open a brand-new pack of blank DVDs a couple of weeks ago and I’m not sure but that may have been when the problems started surfacing…

6

There are 3 things that you can do to make your DVDs play better, if your drive isn’t actually kaput:

  1. As mentioned, try another pack of media
  2. Update your DVD writer’s firmware. Doesn’t seem like it should do much, but the newer firmware on a lot of drives really helps with different media compatibility.
  3. Never burn your DVDs full -stop at 4300MB or so. For some reason the very outside is difficult for a lot of stand alone players - if you limit your DVDs to 4300MB or less you lose a lot of problems.
7

Yikes, the dreaded dilemma of dvd burning, “is my burner dead or is the media just not good?” Having dealt with this about a month ago myself, I agree with Engineer Dude, try verbatim media. In fact, you might want to make a run to the store and get an extremely small package of verbatims and some other name brand that you haven’t used and do a test run with both. If you run into issues with one or both, it’s probably time to consider having dell replace the drive or taking matters into your own hands and replacing the drive yourself (if this doesn’t somehow void your warranty, naturally). On the good news, a good dvd burner drive only runs around $60 really. Good luck.

8

Thanks for the advice, everyone!