Philips DVDR160P

Sorry DVDR1640P, Anyways i've been having a few buring probs in the last 24 hours, when i burn with alcohol 120% it never burns at the speed it's ment to, like when i set it to burn at 8x it will never just sit at 8x it will jump around mostly from 4-7x, in alcohol were it shows you your drive mines used to say Philips DVDR1640P (1.1) now it say Philips DVDR1640P (0.1) seems a bit odd. I tried updateing the firmware to the latest verion but it writes slower than ever so i have to go back to version 3.2 which kinda works ok but when using alcohol it just wont sit at the speed i set it to, when i burn with Nero the speed does not seem to go down but the buffer never stays still it alwasy jumps leading me to think this is a hardware problem, i know it's not my discs as am using ones that i've had no probs with in the past (sony & philips dvd+r).