Hobie-wan wrote:I haven't made a coaster due to buffer underruns since the early 00s. Burners have been able to find the spot and continue for a really long time, though I don't know that I've ever had both the burner and software's buffers completely empty since Windows 95/98 days anyway. I wouldn't be trying to copy gigs of stuff off the same drive as the data source or playing a taxing game at the same time, but it's been a really long time since I did the "start a burn and step away from the PC, avoiding even eye contact until if finishes".

Heh yeah, like I said I knew it was mostly just a conditioned response that has little to no place in reality these days, but it's still ingrained in my mind. "Kill every running process you don't need, and just to be safe unplug the keyboard and mouse afterwards so the cat doesn't walk on it..."
To be honest, I don't even have an optical drive in my main computer these days. I have a DVD burner... somewhere. On the rare occasion I truly need it (which is basically never), I pull it out and hook it up. But honestly, with more than 1 computer, I never need it because the only thing I would REALLY need it for is driver installs on a new computer, and I can just use my other machine to pull them from the web and put on a usb stick. I also have a USB stick to install Win7 from.
Helps that I do little to no PC gaming.