DVD Blues

Isn't technology supposed to work? I mean how long have we had DVDs around, and how long have you been able to buy a DVD burner for your computer? Yet still I buy a highly recommended Pioneer DVR-110D 16X DVD burner and Memorex brand 16X DVR+ disks and it just doesn't work like it should - after five attempts in finally managed to burn my first DVD at 4X without errors.

Granted my computer isn't top of the line, but its no slouch and we're not talking about dumping data at gigabits per second, just a measly 10 to 20MB/s. My Windows XP SP2 is fully patched, I'm using the latest version of Roxio software (I've also tried Sonic Record Now), I've even looked at esoteric stuff like the IDE interface set up. Yes its correctly configured to PIO-4 and UDMA mode 4, and I have an 80 pin IDE cable that's shielded. I tried swapping out the cable with no joy. I tried taking off the old CD drive that was on the slave connector, no joy. After one error that said "Power callibration error" I tried a different power connector with no other periperals hooked up to it. No joy.

So I'm lead to conclude that either I've got an entire stack of media that's bad, or the drive is dead, or well, shit happens and this time its happened to me.

But why? Why shouldn't DVDs and Windows XP just work? And why shouldn't a drive that says it supports DVD+R 16X and DVD+R 16X media from a reputable manufacture just work? Why is it after all these years of writable DVD availability I have to buy special software just to burn a disk? I'm not talking authoring a DVD movie, or anything fancy. I just want to put data files onto a data disk. I mean heck, as far as I know with Windows XP you still can't even read a DVD disk without special software.

This just doesn't add up. Except to the eternity of the long dark tech-time of the soul that is.