not much luck
 

Hello. I have a V4 w/ a no solder chip. I had a previous post a week ago regarding a disc read error with Vice city. I've burned 4 DVD games so far, and Kinetica is the only one I can seem to get to work. (I've gotten a couple CD games to work, but didn't test em' too long). Vice city froze 5 minutes into the game , Slugfest freezes after the second "press start menu" and I just tried Smackdown, and it doesn't even get past the final Action Replay 2 screen. I am using Ritek DVD's and burning with a powermac superdrive. I am using Toast 5.1.4, and doing a straight copy. Always on 1x (its the only choice I have anyway). I was told this could be because of the laser on the V4 not being so great. But is there any other reason that could be causing this???

For one, try to write the image of the disc to the hard drive then from image back to disc, this is the recommended way. It probably will not help though. Odds are 100 to 1 that it is your laser going.

v4 lasers are much weaker then the v5 and v7

my v4 will only load the better brands dvdr (ritek being 1 i use)
but it often need cleaning with a cleaning disk,the 1 with little brushes on it
i have 1 old v4, 1 i got rid of before xmas,both are same

they work but keep em clean

the riteks u use they are the deep dark purple ones?????

Yes, the Ritek's I use are the deep dark purple ones. They are not the newer, 4x ones. The laser in this V4 is as good as its gonna get. I'm saying in terms of how it was. It is a couple years old, but it was barely used. I do have another V4 PS2, that won't read DVD-r's, period. That one's laser is definatly going. I'll try out my lens cleaner for my newer V4. It says its a CD lens cleaner (might mention something about DVD as well on the back, but not sure) it doesn't matter right, they're all the same??

yeah if its got the brushes on the bottom it will do the same thing.

Great news. I cleaned the lens (w/ the lens cleaner disc--w/ the brushes) and all the games I've burned seem to work fine. I haven't gone into too much depth in any of them and wouldn't be surprised if they freeze in the future. Thanks for the advise.

they shouldnt freeze when playing,if u cleaned it

run cleaning disk through it occassionally games will carry on playing np :)