CD-RW lockup help

I recently installed a new internal 52x cd-rw into a friends compaq from 2000. It is a celeron proc, 128mb 100mhz ram, and a 250 watt power supply.

Everything installed fine, and the computer recognizes the drive and reads from it no prob. The first problem came when it reported errors trying to format a cd-rw for udf packet writing. Same thing happened when we retryed. Then we went on to try burning some backup files to cd-r. Worked no problem. We put in another cd-r to run the same task and it locked up at about 13%.. the system locked and the cd-r drive would not spin down. Eventually ctr/alt/delete got rid of nero but the drive did not spin down until restart. We booted up and tried the same exact thing on a new cd-r and got the same lockup results.

Anybody have any insight here? I know my friend told me that the power went off the other day and his computer was on. Is the power supply on the fritz? His computer only reports 127mb of ram btw...very weird -- maybe the ram is going bad???

Any help would be appreciated-

I'm really wondering about the computer showing 127mb of ram... is this representative of ram going bad? Would this be the problem?

127MB of ram lol... that's nothing to worry about. Windows is quirky like that. On one of my older machines I get a different amount of ram almost every time I boot up :D

As to the CDRW locking up... First make sure that DMA is enabled on that drive under your hardware manager. If it isn't that can really slow things down and cause problems like you are describing. Also double check to see that the IDE cable is connected securely to both the drive and the motherboard. Drives can actually work without the cables being on there all the way, but they'll act pretty screwy. One other thing to try is different burning software to see what kind of results you can get. Nero is one of the best out there, and I recommend it, but testing the drive with different software could help find the problem. Good luck :)