Why is windows 7 slow at copying CDs/DVDs

Question

I have a Acer 5720z notebook running Windows 7 and it takes 10 - 15  minutes to copy a 650Mb file from a CD. When I swap the Hard drive and run Win XP it finishes in 3 minutes. Is there anything I can do to make copying CDs faster on Win 7?

Answer 1

There are areas which are not clear on your question to get a clear answers from platform users.

When you say swap the Hard drive and run it on XP:

do you mean trying the cd from Win 7 on XP, l might be wrong from technical view point but you cannt swap a hard drive from a notebook(laptop) running win 7 and run it on PC running XP.  

Having said that, l would check in general this, not in any specific order:

1. what software are you using to write the cd on both machines

2. Is  the laptop not overheating during writing, you can listen to the fans spinning, if so try reducing the writing speed. CDs when they are warm have a fun behaviour like letting the laser light thru it thereby causing retries and slowing the read/write speed.

3. Try up or down the writing speed.

4. the cd rom drive can be different, on PC, Pioneer has always been the leader on read/write speed bt Sony is now edging them slowly.

4. Check the memory usage and if you have enough on win 7. CD writing process buffers everything before it gets written to the actual cd, so if there is not enough memory, it will  buffer, write, stop, buffer again etc.

Comments

Thanks. Let me clear a few things
1.I'm not trying to write CDs but I'm trying to copy some files from CD to Hard drive using Windows Explorer

2. I have two different Hard drives, one with Windows XP and another one with Windows 7. I physically install the HDD with the OS I want to use on the notebook.

3. The problem is not hardware related, I have changed the DVD Drives, tested my Ram (4Gig), the notebook has no overheating issues. (Antivirus and Drivers are up to date)

4. I installed Teracopy and managed to copy the CDs in a little more than 3 Minutes. So it must have something to do with the way Windows Explorer handles discs.
I was wondering if there is something I can enable/disable to make it faster.

Another thing, when I insert a disc and try to open it in Windows Explorer there is a little green bar that fills the address bar before the disc contents are displayed. What is windows doing when that bar is filling?

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Try to change the settings on Windows 7 from nice looking features into performance settings, this will make it lose all the glossy nice looking features but it will up its performance.

The green bar is a default feature on Win 7, from my experience, it is trying to read ahead the cd to make sure it can read it and at the same time buffering the contents.

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could be your CD ROM controller misbehaving, or the type and/or condition of the  CD you are trying to copy from

Answer 2

win7 is not slow, the problem may be your burning software or the speed at which you burn your cd/dvd's. or even your cd/dvd writer. Try software such as Nero,.power ISO and ashampoo

Answer 3

May i ask a question here?

Your HDD's are they both from the same manufacturer and size coz another aspect maybe that there's nothing wrong with e Oses but could be that your drives have different read and write speeds hence the increased read speeds during disk copying (5400rpm or 7200rpm) etc.

Anyway please confirm my theory.

Comments

The funny thing is that the HDD with Win XP is a Maxtor 160gig 5400 rpm and the one with  Win 7 is a Seagate Momentus 320gig 7200.4 rpm.

What I don't understand is why does using a third party software (Teracopy) boost the speed considerably?

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l have always find Micro$haft and Nero a problem when used to read or cds