none of my PCs will burn to a CD anymore unless i set the burn speed to 2x. they burn fine on our Macs but on our PC's it just wont burn. we've traied Memorex, TDK, Magna, and Verbatim and its all the same. what could be the problem?

 

What are the specs on your burner? Are you copying from another cd? If you answered yes to previous question it sounds like you have both drives on the same on the same IDE. Which I have had problems with before.

 

on my computer. my burner is an external HP DVD+RW. on my moms Emachine its an internal 52x CD-RW. on my garage Emachine its the same. and on my Dell its a 24x CD-RW internal. on the Macs its just the Combo drive with is a DVD/CD-RW. and i think its 16x speed. and its being written from the hard drive.

 

It could be that the style of CD's you are choosing is the reason for your problem. I know CD-RW's are crap and they often have to be burned at a very slow rate. You could be having issues with your burning software...

 

It is almost impossible to diagnose this from afar,
but you could at least rule out software problems
if you were to download the free program
called 'Deepburner'
and see if it gets around the 2X limitation:

http://www.deepburner.com/?r=download

Deepburner has worked well for me on several older computers when I used an external USB CD burner.

Another option is to make yourself an
'Ultimate Boot CD for Windows'
which already has Deepburner on it as one of the included programs.
This has the further benefit that as a boot cd it uses its own 'proven to work' drivers instead of the suspect drivers on your problem computer's hard drive.

http://www.ubcd4win.com/

there are many other reasons to keep a UBCD4win CD around for troubleshooting a computer with problems. it can be extremely useful.

 

i use RecordNow and it works at 2x. and we only buy CD-R's cause their cheaper. but see, my DVD writer writes at 16x for my Memorex DVD-R's perfectly without a hitch using any program so...

 

my computer used to do that, then i bought a lense cleaning cd and it helped some, you might be able to solve that by running it through a couple of times, but ultimatley i ended up needing to be able to burn DVDs so i just upgraded my burner and now all is good, so it could be a bad or dirty drive