I bought my dell last year with XP, and a free Vista disc arrived when it came out. I installed the Vista on a second hardrive I installed and dual booted for awhile and eventually dissconected the XP drive. Vista has been fine.. except WLM is no outlook express, but that's not my topic here.

 

In the original configuration I burned many many successful cd's that played everywhere.

 

Within Vista my cdr's do not play in my work shop boom box... ALL other burned cd's play fine on it, and in my car these disc will not play track 1. I need to advance it to track 2 and if I want to play 1 I need to rewind to 1 and then it will play as long as I don't rewind it all the way to the very beginning of the track, and most of the time If I play the entire disc and it starts over track 1 will play..

 

I have tried many brands of software all fully updated. Different disc.  I updated the burners firmware.

Over the last week I have been doing Dell support via email, and I can see everytime I get a new suggestion it's clear the tech has not read through the entire messages. They often ask me to run the same test as a previous contact and one contact was guiding me through XP tests.

 

They want me to run the Utility partition diagnostic. Well because I have a new hardrive that partition does not exist. I tried downloading the test onto a flash drive and went into the bios to boot from the usb but it will not.  I read something about making a bootable usb key. But my guess is that it will not come up with errors because my discs do play on most players and burning dvds is fine. I thought about calling tech, but are afraid that will eat up tons and tons of time, and I remember from last telephone calls it was very hard to go through lots of tech issues with a person with a thick Indian accent... Not  his fault.

I don't know if a new burner was installed if that would help?

But might want to see if Dell will send one... I'm just tired of this problem. I networked my older Dell and have been tranfering files over that it to burn, but I should not have to do that.. I'm fine with Vista and would prefer not to jump back to XP...

 

So, what next..

Thanks

Joel

 

Dell E520

Sony aw-q160s dvd rw

I use TAIYO YUDEN discs most of the time

Burn as slow as possible

And have successfully burned hundreds of cd's