I need help with my DVD burners.

Doug Rolfe · Post by **Doug Rolfe** » 24 Jul 2011 3:14 am

Are these plugins or do they need to be soldered?

Jack Stoner · Post by **Jack Stoner** » 24 Jul 2011 4:17 am

The chipset drivers are software.

Wiz Feinberg · Post by **Wiz Feinberg** » 24 Jul 2011 7:27 am

It is time to examine the motherboard with a good light. Look at the electrolytic capacitors and see if they are bulging and or leaking.

Heat build-up causes sockets to expand over time. Make sure that all plug-in cards and RAM are still firmly seated. Check the heatsink on the CPU for dust build-up and blow or vacuum it out. You need the fins to have space for air to flow. Ditto for all other fans and vents.

Make sure all cables are firmly seated in their sockets.

One often overlooked cause of sudden shutdowns is bad RAM. Initiating a disk burn reserves a lot of RAM, as the image must be saved to RAM before it can be written. If the RAM is going bad such an operation can trigger a sudden reboot. Take your PC to a computer shop and have the RAM replaced, or buy/borrow matched RAM and self-install it, then test the DVD burner. Chances are 1:10 that new RAM will cure the rebooting when you initiate a disk burn.

I have had RAM go bad after two years of flawless operation. It caused random reboots and BSODs. I finally downloaded MemTest and let it run for a couple of hours. After two hours the errors began to show up. The RAM was failing as heat built up in the chips.

If the RAM is indeed bad, I recommend replacing it with brand new Crucial RAM, in matched pairs. This is what I did and it stopped the BSODs and reboots.

Doug Rolfe · Post by **Doug Rolfe** » 25 Jul 2011 1:08 pm

OK. I downloaded and ran memtest with no errors reported. How can I download the chip sets and does that even remotely be a possible answer?

Doug Rolfe · Post by **Doug Rolfe** » 25 Jul 2011 3:28 pm

Are there some utilities that I can download to diagnose various problems without it costing a bunch of money? I've downloaded about 3 of them and they all want to sell their software after telling you that you a thousand errors.

Wiz Feinberg · Post by **Wiz Feinberg** » 25 Jul 2011 8:05 pm

Doug Rolfe wrote:OK. I downloaded and ran memtest with no errors reported. How can I download the chip sets and does that even remotely be a possible answer?

Rolfe;
Go to your computer manufacturer's website and find the support/downloads section. Input your model or serial number to get to the appropriate downloads page. There, you should get all of the motherboard chipset and CPU drivers.