I recently bought a CD-Burner as a part of a computer upgrade. When I try to burn CD’s I get the error message ‘Buffer Underrun’ and the copy isn’t successful. This has happened one or two times in a six-month period but it is happening again. I would appreciate any help with this annoying problem.

Buffer underruns occur when the continuous data transfer to the CD-Burner’s buffer has been interrupted. When you are copying CD’s the CD-Burner requires a constant supply of data. This draws on a bank of data so the data transfer isn’t interrupted during the CD copying session causing the CD copying to fail. The most likely causes of this occurring are a surge in the power supply, the source drive is too slow, the hard drive is fragmented or operations are happening in the background. Ways to prevent the error occurring are (i) copy what you want to put onto the CD to the hard disk first (if you are copying from a CD-ROM drive then this will improve the data transfer rate to the CD-Burner, especially if your CD-ROM drive is slow, thus preventing buffer underruns (ii) defragment your hard drive regularly (iii) disable any non-essential programs that are running in the background while you are copying a CD (eg. virus scanners, screen savers, etc’¦). Since this error is not appearing regularly we can assume that it isn’t a problem with the power supply although if you are concerned that it is then you may want to buy a ’surge buster/mains filter’ which will offer some protection for your computer against power surges and ’spikes’.