Don't print while writing a CDR disc

[George]

Learned something new this morning. Here's my setup. Two P.C's
on cable modem with a router, and the P.C.'s networked, sharing printers.

Was burning a disc in Microstudio and went to the other P.C. and got on to the internet. Have done this many times. This morning, however I needed to print an order I'd placed, and the minute I hit the print button, Microstudio aborted. Perfectly understandable considering the P.C.'s share the printer. Moral of the story: do not do anything with networked P.C's that involve a shared periferal while burning a cd. Has the same effect as screen savers, etc.

Thought I'd pass this along.

Take care,

George

[GordonF]

Looks like you're experiencing a lot of CPU overhead such that interrupting the burning process in any way causes a failure. This is actually a pretty old problem mostly centered on systems with ATAPI burners and no UDMA.

Simple fixes include:

* Making sure your drive can run with UDMA enabled. On Win95 OSR2 and later you can enable ATA(PI) DMA per disk or non-disk device, either in the Device Manager on Win9x and Win2K or with DMACHECK.EXE on NT4.

* If you can, run the CD-R on its own IDE port separate from the hard drive. The ATA protocol for disks and ATAPI protocol for non-disk devices like CD-ROMs don't operate simultaneously on the same cable, so mode swapping can cause delays and CPU overhead.

* Check your printer driver and printer port to make sure a print job doesn't cause an excess of CPU overhead. If you run NT or Win2K you can use Performance Monitor to measure the CPU hit you take when you print - on Win9X you can use System Monitor. Update software as needed. If needed, you can set the printer "off line" while you burn a CD - it should still queue up print jobs both locally and over the network.

Not-so-simple fixes include:

* Getting a separate ATA adapter card for your burner like the Promise IDE controller card. Most of the modern adapter cards in essence act like SCSI cards and save the CPU a lot of overhead.

* Dumping ATA and going SCSI.

* Running Win2K instead of Win9x - better task management especially with CPU-intensive things like crazy screen savers.

[Brian Corr]

Simple solution that I use is to go and make a cup of tea when I am burning a disc. Since it only takes about 5-10 mins to burn a disc I think its better to be safe than sorry and just do nothing on my pc in that time.

I have found in the past open certain applications and carrying out various tasks can result in a new coaster.

[George]

Thanks guys for all the input. This was an isolated set of circumstances for me, and I learned my lesson, so I think Brian's solution is much simpler. Hope neither of you take offense, Gordon for me passing on all the technicalities, and Brian for me substituting
just plain old water. Thanks again, guys.

Take care,

George

[Brian Corr]

I take no offence at you sibstituting tea for water, mabye I should have made it much more clear that it did not just have to be tea.