CD burner burning part of the time?

Ok there is this internal cd burner that came with the dell computer and has worked fine in the past. It is using Recordnow to burn disks. When burning disks it gives a generic there was an error burning the the disk error. About every 5th disk burns fine with no trouble....
Any ideas where to look? The drive is about a year old. It is actually for a friend who called me last night.

I told them to make sure the drive was cleaned and to make sure the speed of the disks they were burning were the same as the speed of the drive. Am I missing anything else?

 

Is your friend using the same brand of CD/R as he usually does or a new brand? Some of the cheaper discs, especially store brands, are more coaster-prone. Perhaps he should check for a firmware update, too. I've used RecordNow and i worked fine, too.

 

Most likely there is an update to RecordNow!.

Check for firmware.

Plus remind him to close all applications when burning CD's.

See how it goes from there.