What is max capturing ability with P3-550mhz/BT878/Win2k ?

[twodogs]

I recently moved house and lost access to a more powerful PC, but took my capture card with me.
I have borrowed a friend's PC for day-to-day use at my new house.

My aim is to convert VHS and 8mm to CVD (for future DVD compatibility).

My PC's specs are:
P3 550mhz 256mb SDRAM
40gb Seagate 7200rpm
24x AOpen CRW2440 burner (on Secondary IDE)
Askey/Dynalink Magic TView99 Capture Card with BT878 chip
Windows 2000sp3

I have read various posts such as:
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=124326 which indicates capture is possible with a 450mhz, but does not mention what format is used.
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=81808 which lists ways to tune the PC for capturing (although I am willing, I have not done these steps yet)

I tried some short captures last night using VirtualVCR at 352x576 MJPEG18, but was dropping 10% frames, but CPU was hovering at only around 35%. It also appeared to only be capturing around 14-15fps even though 25 was entered.
Tried VDub but CPU was 100% at 352x288.

So, my questions, as indicated in the subject:
1) Given my PC specifications, what is the best I should be able to capture - in terms of resolution, codec, software? (ie. what is your experience with a similar PC?)
2) Will a partition help? or will that produce same result as a defrag?

(not looking for responses to buy faster parts, just looking for best that I should be able to achieve with this setup)

Thanks in advance.

[D_Knife]

have you tried installing the BTwincap drivers for this card????

if you already have it installed - try capping in YUY2 when using MJEG PicVideo this saves double handling the colour compression - could be a big saving!

if your only getting 35% CPU then it seems to be more a disk bottleneck than a lack of processing power - some other things you can try are

defraging the drive

converting the drive to NTFS with a larger than normal block size of say 16 or 32Kb - this will slightly ease the load on the disk

check your using DMA transfer for the drive- W2K and XP should automatically do this - but you never know

if it's an intel based mainboard - not just the CPU then try installing
Intel Application Accelerator
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/

Hope this helps a little bit