Thinkpad 600x and external DVD drive

[tcostello]

A thinkpad 600x was given to me. I added 128 MB of RAM and bought an external DVD-RW. The RAM went in fine, and the external DVD drive is connected via a PC Card that has a USB adapter on it. The DVD drive is what is giving me a problem.

I can put a music or data CD into the drive and it is read properly. I even installed some software via the external DVD drive. The problem I am having is when I insert a blank CD into the drive. Once I do that, and look at My Computer, it takes forever for it to load. When the window does finally load I can't really do anything because everything else goes extremely slow and it says the CD is full. This only happens if the CD is blank and I am running something that calls on the external drive, like My Computer, or anything that checks to see how much room is on the CD.

I am not sure why it would work fine with a full CD, but freak out at the sight of a blank CD. There was an internal CD drive but it wasn't working properly, and it didn't have the ability to write to CD. I disabled that drive and took it out of the laptop.

The OS is XP. The machine is not connected to the internet.

Thanks in advance.

[pkiff]

I have had a similar slowdown occur on my 600X when my internal drive mis-recognized a blank CD for a full CD. In my case, I decided that the problem was that my silver Memorex blank CDs from a bulk box store were somewhat poorly manufactured. If I used a black Memorex blank CD in the same drive the problem did not occur. And I had some difficulty periodically when I was trying to burn those silver CDs as well. Is it possible that the problem is with your blank CDs?

Also, some drives are more sensitive to flaws than others I think.

Phil.