CD/DVD burning suddenly super slow

All of the sudden my CD/DVD burner is burning significantly slower than it used to. What used to take 5 minutes to burn a cd is taking 15-20 minutes and dvds I used to burn in 15 or 20 minutes are taking hours. There are a couple of other weird things as well. When I burn a cd, the buffer level keeps jumping all around the place. It will go to 90% to 27% back up to 80% then 50%, etc. It used to just stay at 100 or high 90s the whole time until the very end of the burning process when it would wind down to finish the disk. Also, I used to have no trouble doing other things while burning a cd, but now the mouse lags behind and if I have music playing, it will be interrupted, but this never happened before until recently. It's like I'm running low on memory, but I never had any issues like this before and burned many projects quickly and successfully. I have 2 gigs of RAM and a fast processor and a fast hard drive and everything was clicking fine. I have tried a couple of different burning programs and they are all slow, so somehow a setting must have changed I guess. Any ideas on what I can do? Thanks, Jay

Ok, I was able to get to part of the root of the problem. I found out that my Primary IDE Channel transfer mode somehow got switched to PIO instead of DMA. To fix it, I had to unistall my burner, reboot, let windows detect the burner again and reinstall it and then reboot again. After this, it would be fine until I noticed it tripped over to PIO mode again. This seems to occur after a ask the computer to read a data DVD that is filled with pictures. Does anyone have any idea why this would occur or what I could do to get it to stop occuring? Each time it happens, I have to uninstall and reinstall the burner all over again. Any ideas or theories would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Jay

Hi punchoutkid, I know you're hoping that I will post an informative explanation (which I don't have right now). Actually the reason for my reply is to express my appreciation to you for offering the partial explanation/workaround that you have discovered up to this point. We all can learn from such good spirit in posting, and I appreciate you for it. Best Regards

Dough, Thanks for the compliment. It's the least I can do for a site that has given so much to me. Jay

Just a thought… If you're burning a lot of CD/DVD's, maybe you're also filling up your Hard Drive? How much "free space" do you have? And, of course, you'd want to check what "new applications" may be running from your Start Menu. Start - Run - (type)MSCONFIG - Enter - StartUp(tab) Even machines with as much RAM as you have can get bogged down with applications running in the background. And, further, Run a few Malware scans. You don't want to be thinking it's your burning tools, while spyware, trojans, or viruses are having a field day with your machine! Best Regards