problem burning CD in BenQ EW162I DVD burner

I have 32-bit Vista Ultimate installed legitimately. Whenever I hook up my
BenQ EW162I external DVD burner to my comp and try to burn a CD after setting
the default CD burner in the Properties window to the BenQ drive, Windows
Explorer freezes and takes a good 3 minutes to unfreeze itself. Sufficed to
say, I have yet to burn a CD successfully in that drive. Windows Explorer
also freezes just as badly when I try to delete the temporary files to be
burned from the external drive's window. This happens no matter if I select
the Live or Mastered disk format.

Oddly enough, this never happens in my internal CD burner! I can burn disks
and delete temporary files from the window without any problems. More
importantly, when I use the latest Vista-compatible version of Nero to burn a
CD in the external DVD burner, I am able to do so successfully without any
problems. The reason why I want to be able to burn CD's in the external drive
is simply because it's faster, 40X versus 24X for the internal drive.

I've tried flashing my DVD burner with the latest firmware from BenQ, but
the device manager informs me that the firmware version already installed is
newer than what's available on BenQ's website. Both optical drives have the
native Vista drivers installed.

What could be the issue here? I've made sure to select the external drive as
the dedicated CD burner in the properties window before every time i try to
burn something in Windows Explorer on the external drive. I have noticed the
difference in the file format between a CD burned in Nero, regardless of
which drive I used, and one burned in my internal drive in Windows Explorer.
Nero burns disks in the CDFS format while Vista makes them in UDF. I don't
particularly care about this, but I hope the DVD burner is able to interpret
the data Vista sends it in UDF just as well as it can interpret CDFS data.

For the record, I've been able to burn CD's with XP's native CD burning
feature flawlessly on both drives prior to upgrading to Vista. I understand
that I might as well use Nero to burn CD's, but sometimes it's more
convenient to just drag and drop files into the burner's folder and click
"Burn".

Any suggestions would save me A LOT of time!! Thanks very much in advance.

Delta_J
2.4 GHz P4
1 GB RAM
40 GB Hard Drive
Matsushita 24X/16X/24X DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo drive (internal)
BenQ EW162I 16X DVD-RW DL drive (external)

Did you get the Vista compatible driver from BENQ Website? Second you may
have to wait for the BENQ to come out with BENQ to make a new firmware for
their product. The problem has nothing to do with VISTA. It is the BENQ
hardware.

haha Yes I thought it would be something along those lines. Thanks, kayusee,
for the quick reply. I bet it's got something to do with the UDF format
because that's the only difference in the disks that stands out even though
the BenQ drive is able to read successfully burned CD-R and CD-RW disks no
matter with which drive I burned them. Oh well, I guess it's time to play the
waiting game with BenQ not to mention all those other companies that have yet
to publicly release Vista-compatible programs.

Cheers,
Delta_J

"kayusee" wrote:

>
> Did you get the Vista compatible driver from BENQ Website? Second you may
> have to wait for the BENQ to come out with BENQ to make a new firmware for
> their product. The problem has nothing to do with VISTA. It is the BENQ
> hardware.