I have to make this a very quick question:

I've burned about 300 dvds with my dell laptop. I have a sony dvd-r that was installed by dell. I'm using nero burning rom 6. About 2 weeks ago my system slowed to a crawl.

I can burn a cd at what appears to be normal speed, but when I burn files to dvd using nero it takes almost always 75 minutes to burn a 2 hour DVD. I can burn at 2x, 4x, 6x, no matter what, these are the results I get. I purchased Taiyo Yuden 8x dvd blanks exclusively. I can't say which batch of dvds is causing the problem right now.

I ran Nero's cd-dvd speed and with a movie cd in the drive got a result of 0.92x. With a cd in the drive I got 8x as results.

I'm new to troubleshooting this, any tips would be helpful.

sounds like a DMA issue , check out this guide
http://club.cdfreaks.com/f61/troubleshooting-enabling-checking-dma-windows-vista-xp-2000-me-9x-101616/

Yes, fixing the regustry key as described in one of the links off the article you referenced above did the trick in about 10 minutes.

thanks!

1) Check to make sure your burner and Hard Drive both are in DMA position>
2) Check to make sure that you have enough free space in your har drive.
3) Try to Defrag your hard drive.
4) Try to delete the temp file from your hard drive.
5) Try to empty your Recycle-bin.
6) Deactivate any program that is active in the background.

I have also recently run into this problem. I am going to try the fix recommended above but why would these suddenly change? I have not done anything differently on my system?

Windows is nice & friendly about this - NOT.

If you get some errors on the drive Windows will eventually drop the DMA mode and resort to PIO mode. Doesn't tell you of course.

They tell me one of the reasons for getting these errors is a bad IDE riibbon cable. It should be the newer 80 conductor type. Cables can become damaged. Using a round cable is inviting trouble.