help!

my dvd-rw is wonky. i burnt my interview onto CD today, and the length was about 17 minutes. it'd normally take a minute or two, but it took 7 minutes. just to give a clearer view, a standard (full) 750MB/80 minute CD should take about three and a half to four minutes to burn. thinking that this was a one-off thing, i burnt Azamanga Daioh and Beck (both about 4.2 GB) seperately, on Nero and Roxio respectively. it took 40 minutes per disc. the write speed was constant at 1.3 to 1.4x. these are DVD-Rs, not RWs.

to give a clearer picture, a fewweeks ago i burnt the first season of two and a half men (4.6 GB) and it took 7 minutes.

help me. please. this is boggling. i want the Nero countdown timer to work for a reason. this is a drive problem...solutions would be welcome (short of calling Dell and complaining about it).

update: just tested the drive with a cd-r and my top speed is 15x (out of a maximum of 48x). i'm quite worried.