Can’t Burn a DVD?

Posted By : Peter Dunbar Title: PCaholic.com Senior Technical Writer  PCaholic - Free Computer Optimization Tips

I had an interesting occurence yesterday when a friend called me and told me he had a hard time burning a DVD. He mentioned that the message he was getting was that he didn’t have enough space on his hard drive. What he would do is rip it from the DVD onto his hard drive, then burn it to a CD.

I asked him what he was running and he quickly told me XP. I thought the fastest way I could help him would be for him to bring his computer to the lab and I could troubleshoot much easier.

Getting Started

Once we set it up and fired it up I knew it was an older machine. He was running a 1.4 GHZ celeron with 128MB of RAM. As you can imagine I immediately told him that he needed some updating if this were a machine he was using full time.

Actually he said he only used it to burn DVD personal backup copies. He doesn’t sell them on eBay or anything.. I know him quite well.

I actually called a freind of mine who is pretty computer savvy and we both troubleshot the issue. First we checked out his hard drive and realized he was using the max capacity of just under 40GB. When further inspecting, we noticed he had little to nothing installed. That didn’t make sense.

We quickly started narrowing down where the space was being taken starting by right clicking on ”Documents and Settings” and selecting properties. Sure enough, whatever it was was in there!

Ah Ha!

We found the culprit in a temp file. It was a bunch of old DVD’s he had already burned but didn’t delete. We simply deleted them out and he was good to go!

I knew he had a laptop as well, one that was a lot faster than this stone age desktop and I asked him why he wasn’t using that to burn. He told me it didn’t come equipped with a DVD burner.

I offered to research one for him as he didn’t have a clue he could easly swap out his CD ROM drive. He was pretty excited!

His laptop is an HP but i’m not sure of the model. It should be pretty easy to find once I start looking however, I did tell him an external burner is also an option.