does size matter!

[theted]

hi,can anyone tell me if my pc has enough power to drive a dvd writer
...it's a celeron 900mhz...128mb sdram...20gb hard disk drive...any info
appreciated...

[johns0]

you`ll be able to write but not do anything else at the same time especially if you are on winxp,best to get more ram,256mb at least.

[RabidDog]

yes more ram, followed closely by a bigger hard disk. Defrag often. Close non-essential programs ( screensaver / antivirus ) when burning.

[Innershield]

Women say yes. Men say no.

[Canoe164]

I have a buddy that is running a simular setup. I gather from him that it takes considerable more time to burn, but it works.

[Vejita-sama]

Yes, you can burn DVDs with a 300Mhz PC. The real limitation with your system is your HD. DVD5 discs are 4.7Gb and DVD9 discs get up to 8.5GB. So unless that's 20MB of freespace you're going to run out of room.

Also any processing is going to take 2x the source size, at least. Eg. backing up a DVD9 discs to a single DVDR. You have to rip the DVD to the HD, then encode. That's a 14GB job minimum, if you re-encode w/ CCE or TMPGenc then re-author the sizes goes up by a factor of 3x.

IDE HDs are cheap. When you get your burner just buy the biggest HD you can afford (these days 60GB drives are all but free). Extra ram and CPU speed are needed to PROCESS your projects, but not to actually burn them. That is you want them, but they aren't necessary.

So it's HD > Ram > cpu (cpu is actually fine I got by with a K62 500Mhz for a long time everything was just slow as hell).