Recovery CD fixing Windows virtual memory problem?

[eg]

I have a ~2 year old PowerSpec PC (PowerSpec is the Micro Center
"house" brand). My wife convinced me to buy the extended warranty, so
now that I have it, I'm trying to use it...

Starting about 2 months ago, we've had problems burning CDs, and now
we're having problems reading CDs. The failure mode for burning CDs
has been either:
1) Prints out "finalizing CD... 5 seconds remaining..." but then
continues to spin (about another 5 minutes) untill it prints out an
error.
2) If (1) occurs, and I click on "cancel", I have to phsyically power
cycle the computer (soft power down doesn't work).
3) Sometimes it appears as though the CD was burned correctly. But
when I pop it back in and try to read it, the data isn't there.
I've tried different CD-R brands, blank CDs, CDs with some data on
them... no difference. Right now, if I try to burn something small
enough (e.g. ~2Mb of JPGs), I have a ~20% chance of it working.
Anything larger and the chance of working goes down. The problem is
getting progressively worse.

So I called the extended warranty people. They've had me do the
following:
1) Uninstall the CD driver and reboot (this yields a "found new
hardware messge" and the driver gets reinstalled upon reboot). Made no
difference.
2) Buy a CD laser lens cleaner and "play" it on my drive
(unfortunately, my drive is in bad enough shape that it won't autoplay
this disk - I tried it out on another computer and it cam eup in
Windows Media player just fine, so the CD is fine).
3) Try burning a CD with some other software (I have RealPlayer, so I
used that to burn some random song - RealPlayer said that the burn was
successful, but again, the data does not appear on the CD when I pop it
back in).
4) Use the sytem restore utility to go "back in time" to before the
problem was occuring. I went back ~3 months, made no difference.
NOW... they want me to use my Emergency Recovery CD, to reinstall (of
course, causing me to lose all data, software, ...). They claim they
need to rule out any software problem before they can state under the
extended warranty, "We think it's a hardware problem, we'll pay for a
new drive".

The claim is that over time (i.e. over a period of 2 years), programs
that leak memory can fill my entire drive (80Gb) with unfreed virtual
memory, which doesn't go away when I reboot, and that the only way to
fix this problem, is to reinstall from the Recovery CD (wiping out
everything on the system).

Is there any shread of truth in what thy're telling me? Personally, I
believe their trying to get out of their end of the contract...

FWIW, my 80Gb drive has more than 70Gb free (as indicated by
"Properties" of my C drive). It has a Pentium, I think ~2GHz.

Thanks for any advice.

 

[Ted Zieglar]

"The claim is that over time (i.e. over a period of 2 years), programs
that leak memory can fill my entire drive (80Gb) with unfreed virtual
memory, which doesn't go away when I reboot, and that the only way to
fix this problem, is to reinstall from the Recovery CD (wiping out
everything on the system)."

That paragraph doesn't make a shred of sense, nor does it have anything
to do with your computer's ability to burn CDs.

Presuming that everything else in your computer runs correctly, tell the
bozo at the shop to swap the burner and ribbon cable in your computer
with a spare burner and ribbon cable they have lying around their shop.
That will tell them if the problem is caused by your burner.

Or, if you don't feel like trusting your computer to the bozo, buy a CD
burner - they're pretty cheap these days - and try it yourself.