Can't get a perfect burn yet

I still can't get a perfect disc to come out of my Panasonic LF-D311 unit. They usually break up in the last quarter of disc play. The puzzle I cannot solve is that I lent the drive and the blank discs I have been using to a friend, who installed them in his machine, and he can burn perfectly each time. Mine is just as fast, I tried replacing an IDE cable, nothing seems to fix it. The only other issue I can figure is power from the power supply unit being insufficient, but they why are the discs usually bad at the end and not in random places?

try and not use your computer when recording because this can cause a buffer underun. also make sure that the buffer within your recording software is set to the max which i believe is 1mb. i use gear pro ed and i was experiencing the same problem until i noticed that the software had the buffer set at 512kb as default. after changing it to 1mb i have had no more problems.

I definately don't touch the machine while burning. It used to mess up when I did that. I use VOB and Spruce to burn, with maximum buffer.

is the burner on an ide channel by itself? this definately helps. is udma selected? if so try disabling it although everyone suggests that this be enabled, it may be causing problems, you never know. if your mb is via then install the latest 4 in 1's. i upped the buffer after installing the new 4 in 1's so maybe it was the update that solved the problem and not the buffer size. at least you know its a problem with your configuration or setup and not the drive otherwise it would not have worked on your friend comp. i'm afraid it's just a process of elimination until you find out what is causing you problem. maybe try new software. download gear pro. ed. trial from i've had the greatest success with this prog.

I just disabled DMA and am trying PIO, let you know what happens. The motherboard is from Dell. I guess I can try a Dell BIOS upgrade. I've had problems with 2 different software packages so far, so I don't think it's the burning software.

PIO mode seemed to work, but i'm not quite convinced yet. I burned another disc, and watched it from where the last one broke up, and got to the end without a problem. Also browsed around the disc and didn't notice anything. I also closed an application, JRun, which is for work and was running in the background. But it shouldn't be active at all unless I'm compiling JSPs, so i don't think that's a factor. Although to make sure, I will probably close it each time I burn a disc. Now I need to ask this friend of mine if his IDE bus that the drive was installed on was set to DMA or PIO.