Hardware

Have you ever "burned on the fly?" No -- I'm not talking about burning an insect with a magnifying glass like some of us did when we were younger (kids can be so cruel!) Burning on the fly is a technical term that essentially means writing directly ... to a CD recorder from another source other than your hard drive. Usually when a CD is burned, it is read from the hard drive and then written to the CD burner. The important thing to note here is that a hard drive can retrieve information must faster than any other source-medium of information. An example of burning on the fly might be ... (view more)

If you own a CD Burner, there's a good chance that you've come across a "Buffer Underrun" error message. A buffer underrun happens when information cannot be recorded to the CD because of resource starvation. All CD recorders without buffer underrun ... protection require a constant flow of data to be read from the hard drive to the CD recorder without interruption. If the flow of data is stopped, a buffer underrun will follo w. For example, if your hard drive can only read information at a rate of X and the CD Recording needs information at a rate of X+1, this is referred to resource ... (view more)

A CD is an acronym for Compact Disc. It can refer to any media type which is based on CD technology. For example, a CD can be a computer disc, a music disc, or a video CD. Each CD standard is defined by ISSO-9660, a model used by the International ... Standards Organization. Because there are so many different CD formats, there are a number of books describing certain formats and specifications for each type. For example, the ISSO-9660 Red Book defines standards that all devices which play music CDs must follow for 100% compatibility. Here is a quick run-down about ISSO-9660 standards (adapted ... (view more)

This week I received a question from one of our visitors which asked, "What is the difference between the Pentium, Celeron, and Athlon processors?" To best answer this question, we must first understand a bit of processor history, starting with ... Intel's flagship processor, the Pentium. In 1993, Intel brought the PC to a new level with the Pentium processor. The first Pentium processor ran at an astounding 60 Mhz, had 3.3 million transistors, and performed 100 Million Instructions Per Second (MIPS). Although no one today refers to the first Pentium processor as a Pentium 1, it is the ... (view more)