Need Help with "Burning or Recording CD's"


I bought an internal CD Burner (Samsung $29.95) for my PC to burn some CD's. Every CD that I have burned has errors or drop outs in the sound. I keep getting the message "Possible read error" before the burn takes place. I am burning at the slowest speed possible and I have defragged my hard drive (whatever that means). I am pretty stupid when it comes to PC's. I don't want to sink a lot of money into this, but would I be better off with a CD Recorder instead of a burner on my PC? I am just looking for a simple reliable way of duplicating some CD's for my personal use. I am from the old school of cassette recorders and they sure seemed easier than all this digital stuff. Thanks in advance for any help.
slowhand
Make sure you get an error-free copy onto your hard drive. Use Exact Audio Copy. The article on 6moons will help you.

http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/eac/eac.html

Regards,
I've used several computer internal CDR/RW drives: 4 sony's in a desktop and now a DVD/CD/RW drive in my new laptop. I've never had a problem with recording music CD's. Disks have all turned out fine and I record all the time, so my bet is that something must be wrong with the Samsung.

You know, now that I think about it, I did encounter errors on 1 ocassion, but it was because I started using MS explorer while the CD was writing to the hard drive. I've since learned don't touch the damn machine when it's recording!
The problem may have to do with how you're doing your burning. Do not just read from one CD drive and burn directly to the burner. First copy the CD to your hard drive using something like the EAC program mentioned by Metralla. Then use a CD burning program to read from the hard drive and write to your burner.

The EAC program is considered the best program, but can take some set up to work. First use it to copy a track and then play that track. Sometiimes the resulting track can be silent. If that happens go to "Drive Options" and have it "Detect Read Features".

Good luck.