I seem to be the poster child for failed hardware. Today, my Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-112D decided to stop writing discs. From what I can tell, though, this has been going on since the day I installed this disc drive. Pioneer admitted in 2007, just prior to my purchase of the drive, that there are some manufacturing problems with the drive. They shipped the drive because they "did not feel that a use-case existed in which the error would manifest." Well, apparently that was wrong because many a person has experienced problems with these drives. For the last year, I've noticed that my Windows XP 64-bit has been experiencing random halts that would last for about 5 seconds. During that time, I would grumble and refine my repertoire of colorful expletives. Today, after installing a SONY DRU-842A as a replacement, I noticed the random halting was gone. The startup time for Windows was back to its super-fast normal self. With the Pioneer in there, sometimes the Windows boot would ju