My replacement dvr-104 arrived yesterday and I'm still having problems, mainly with the drive stopping writing at a random point during the write process when using ulead MF or dvdit and crashing the machine. Nero managed to write fine (although my 3.3 gig file still screwed up until I split it into 2x 1.6gig files after which it worked) using Choice at 1x speed but not 2x. In a fit of desparation I contacted Pioner. Here is the response (including spelling mistakes, although to their credit they did respond pretty quickly so I'll let them off) "The faults you discribe are common problems caused by poor media, Not all DVD-R disks are the same, many of the very cheep disks or disks that claim to be 2X compatable are proper DVD-R disks. These fake disks are not produced to the corect standards required by the DVD forum, These disks use media ID codes from other manufacturers to trick the drive into thinking that thay are something thay are not. Pioneer does not recomed the use of these fake disks." I'm going to re-install windows to see if that helps. Does anyone have any ideas, or is Pioneer correct in their diagnosis (and if so can anyone recommend some reliable gradeA dvd-r's?) Cheers, Taq Media Used (bought from digitalpromo): Choice 2x Speed "Blue Top" 4.7GB DVD-R Datasafe 4.7GB DVD-RW (Re-writable) White Label Gen. 4 DVD-R 2x Speed 4.7GB Media. DVD Writer: DVR-104 Firmware 1.30 CPU: Athlon 1.0 Ghz Motherboard ABIT KT7 VIA Graphics Card: Nvidea GeForce3 Hard Drive: Quantum Firebird 40gig, Maxtor 80gig Memory: 512MB Crucial PC133 CAS2 OS: Windows XP
Wahoo! Since formatting my C drive and installing windows 2000 Pro instead of XP, I've made 5 dvds and no coasters! So much for Pioneer's 'dodgy media' idea. Cheers, Taq
