Help and Feedback !!!!

[hassali]

Hey guys, i was hopng for some help and good advice!

I was wanting to buy a dvd rewriter, but my computer isn't the greatest.
The specs for my computer are:

IBM Pentium 3, 500Hz
128Mb Ram
12Gig hard drive, only around 2-3gigs of which are free.
I have a Cd re-writer and a DVD-drive.

I was looking at some dvd-writers and it looks that Sony is probably the best, i would probably go for the Sony DRX-500UL, the external version of the DRU-500AX.

I would probably use the dvd-writer to backup dvd's, convert vcd's, svcd's to dvd and stuff like that.


Anyone with any helping tips on what i should do or get, would be great
and any help is greatly appreciated.

p.s. i have been wanting to get a dvd-writer for a while and would like to get one within a few months

[vric]

your system is the minimum, but if you want to backup DVD, you will need at least 15gig free of space for 1 DVD (8gig for ripping, 4gig for final result + temporary files)

so you difinitly need a HD.. the CPU is slow, so expect at least 1 hours for DVD2one and over 5 hours for Instant Copy 7...

[VinnySem]

Get yourself a FireWire/USB 2.0 Combo card, test whichever interface gives you better results. And get yourself a second HD for file storage before burning. If you are going to backup a DVD using a rip-reencode-reauthor type method, that system will take DAYS to transode an mpeg stream. Using DVD2ONE or a similar application will take less time, but if you're very picky about picture quality, those are not the way to go.

Consider spending a few hundred bucks on an AMD system, you can assemble a very good AthlonXP/nForce2 based system for less than the price of the Sony DRU500UL. I have an AthlonXP 2400 that is overclocked, it takes less than 4 hours to do a 5-pass CCE re-encode of a 2.5 hour movie. The CPU can be had for less than $90, and a great nForce2 motherboard with integrated everything is less than $110. All in all, for $400 you can built a fantastic DVD processing system, plus burner.

[trialsofg]

You don't mention in your post the most important piece of hardware - what video card you are using?
I currently have a P-3 866 with 768 mg ram, which I upgraded from a 550, but I didn't see a marked difference until I went from a 32 mg video card to a 64 mg video card. The other post about another hard drive is totally correct; you need more storage space, because even with DVD Shrink or DVDXcopy, you will need at least the size of the movie (4 -8 gb) to do the whole process. If you are new to the process, I would recommend the 321 product DVDXcopy Express as it is very simple to use and you can always learn the other products as you become more experienced and comfortable with your abilities.
Good Luck,