My laptop's a 2 year old Toshiba. It's been good so far (aside from some of the Windows Vista glitches). And has lately (in the past month) been acting up with CDs. I know how to burn CDs with Windows Media Player, but lately it doesn't seem to want to. I'm not sure if its the CDs or my lightscribe software... I had to change CD brands because the stores here have run out of the ones I normally use and it seemed to be fine with a couple CDs, but I have a pack of 20 blank Verbatim CD-Rs that say they're recordable... and yet only the occasional one burns properly. This is what I do to burn it: Pop the CD-R in, go to WMP, click the burn tab, and drag songs from WMP playlists to the CD-R column on the right. In the past this has worked but it's not working now. I hit burn and it starts analyzing CDs, then burning them and when it gets to the last song, it says it's finalizing disc, then says complete, then pops the CD-R back out of the disc drive. When I tyr to play it in my stereo, car stereo or back in the computer again, it says Error or that there's no disc in there at all. Aaah frustration. Can someone please help me with this? I really appreciate it.
Could you try another brand? Some cheap brands (I don't think verbatim is one of these, though) or bad manufacturing runs can be unreliable, and you'll probably be better off throwing out the spool if that's the case. If it's the drive, then you might just need a new one, or maybe Toshiba can repair it if it's under warranty. That's one thing I like about Apple -- I can take my computer to the mall to get it repaired under warranty, and mostly painlessly at that. My old (and stolen) G4 iBook developed a problem where it would be unable to properly (it was very slow, and failed frequently) read discs and even when it did read them would refuse to eject them. I'd have to hold it upside down and hit the eject button repeatedly (at the suggestion of someone on a forum somewhere) to finally get it to eject. The clerk (err, "Genius"?) at the Mac Store was dumbfounded as to why of all things that would work to eject the disc. In any case, they took the computer for a few days and returned it with a new, working drive, no cost to me.
