PC reboots when opening any burning software

[Westender]

Hi, have an oldish machine on XP, Pentium iV 2.66, 1512 ram, 80gb hard disk. Considering its age PC is running well generally, but if I put a blank cd or dvd into the writer and open any burning software - incl media player - the pc reboots. Read somewhere that it might be the psu. Not sure what power the psu is. Is a faulty/underpowered psu the most likely cause?

[jlreich]

It is likely the PSU. It may be on its last leg and when you go to burn a disk it sucks too much power and the PSU shuts down. Or in the case that happened to me a few years ago my PSU's fan was seized up. It worked fine under normal load, but would overheat and shutdown as soon as I started burning a DVD.

Make sure you PSU's fan is working correctly. You should feel warm air coming out of the back of it but not too hot.

You can buy a PSU tester for about $20 at your local computer shop. That will make sure it is putting out the proper voltages.

It's much less likely but possible that the drive is faulty and causing the problem.

[Sylvander]

1. If the PC has separate optical reader and writer drives...
You could try running a FREE Knoppix 5.1.1 CD from a live CD (http://iso.linuxquestions.org/knoppix/knoppix-5.1.1/) and using its included disk burning program to burn using the other drive.
Here's the ISO file used to make a bootable disk. (ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/dist/knoppix/KNOPPIX_V5.1.1CD-2007-01-04-EN.iso)

2. If the PC only has a single optical burner...
Puppy is specifically MADE for older hardware; I recommend it. :)
(A) You could use one of the many official (http://www.puppylinux.org/downloads/official-releases) or unofficial [puplet] (http://www.puppylinux.org/downloads/puplets) versions of Puppy Linux [latest official version 4.1.1].
Which one suits your hardware depends mainly on how much RAM you have, because puppy tries to run totally in RAM, and will if there's enough [which makes it REALLY FAST], and if that succeeds as it aught, the optical drive is then free for other use.
E.G. TEENpup (http://www.puppylinux.org/wiki/archives/old-wikka-wikki/categoryderivative/teenpup)->looks really nice (http://linux.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/TeenPup-Screenshot-31563.html), includes LOADS of useful programs [particularly audio-visual], but is presently only set up to work in the US "Locale", and...
"Runs well on old pentium III 800Mhz 128MB of RAM PC's, even better on current PC's".

3. You may well find that you like this better [FASTER] than Windows, and decide to do certain work in this environment.
At the very least, if it works just fine when Windows will not, it will let you know there's nothing wrong with the hardware...
IT'S A WINDOWS PROBLEM!
You can also [pretty much] forget about the possibility of infection!
It can be easily installed to...
For example a 1 GB plus Flash Drive, from within the OS once loaded.