Slow Processor a problem?

[Poppa_Meth]

I'm setting up a very old PC for a friend of mine who really just wants to burn music CDs on it. Its a PII 350 and I'm noticing a lot of new CD burners are listing a PII 400 as minimum requirement. I'm just wondering if its really a problem having a slower processor or if it may just limit write speed or something similar.

[DereX888]

I have even worse old 233MHz clunker from 1997 still running here on W2K. It is good as home communication system (server, answering machine, fax, emails etc) and yes - it has cdwriter which occasionally is used to burn cds. No problems. Just dont dont run too many apps at once.
More important is how much memory your old box has.

[Poppa_Meth]

its got 64MB but I'm probably gonna pop a 128 stick in it. It'll be running 98SE so I think thats adequite

[DereX888]

Then you'll have what my old box has now (192MB)

I actually have 2x128MB sticks there, but it only shows 192MB, either its the bios limit, or somethin else, I probably should ask here does any1 know PB-795 (i think thats what is there) mobo's memory limit hehe 8)

[Poppa_Meth]

I have no idea what's in mine. Someone gave it to me yesterday and I haven't opened it up yet. I'm going off the brief tech specs on gateway's site that I've pulled up so far. might be something completely different in there when I get it open.

[lechtin]

2 things.

1- When setting up a old PC, check the motherboard's website for BIOS updates. They often contain updates when new versions of Windows come out. I set up a PII 300MHz with Windows XP and 256MB of memory and it runs flawlessly, after I cleared an incompatibility with XP by updating the BIOS.

2. Don't pay much attention to minimum processor requirements for hardware like printers and burners. It's really more for the software that comes with it. If you don't plan to use it (like a greeting card making software for a printer), it will still do the job of printing from Word for example. P.S. most burning programs work fine with 300MHz and up, and there are free alternatives that will work with lesser requirements.

[Poppa_Meth]

yeah I've already been to Gateway's site and gotten all the updates I think I'll need, especially the BIOS. I'm looking at a lite-on drive on Newegg that goes for $30. It lists the requirements at PI 166 minimum so I'm definitely not too worried on that one. And its half the price of any I can find locally.

[DereX888]

AFAIR my first witer was on P 166MMX with huge 78MB RAM lol (drive was HP superfast 2xWORM hehe - anyone remember what it stand for? /1x CD-RW) and it worked fine.

I have few Seinfeld VCDs created back then still working today (good Kodak medias, all other ones including very expensive then Verbatims are long gone due to organic dye decay lol).

As I said before - you need as much RAM as it can handle, hopefully at least 256, because most of nowaday software wants at least 40MB for buffer, and i think you should set up in every writing software as big buffer as you can, but you wouldn't want windows to use hard disk memory buffering either when you burn cd on such slow clunker
And yes to what lechtin wrote - in many cases BIOS update is a must if you want some newer OS than Win9x on it.

[lenti_75]

that is fine for CD's.......more than you need it

[burnman99]

yeah that should be plenty enough processor. I used to burn SVCD stuff on a 266mhz P II. I think i did have plenty of ram though around 192MB and a 2X external old parallel port burner! I think it took 14 hours to convert a 45 min program to mpeg2! Boy, those were the days!

Have fun stormin' the castle!

Rog

[DereX888]

22-23min seinfeld episode, captured already in 352x240 avi (so - no resizing whatsoever mind you) used to take *few days* to encode to VCD on P-166 with Panasonic encoder and i forgot what encoder i had before that, but it was even slower (panasonic had at least mmx optimization lol), and philips vcd tk always rejected them as non-compliant, same as first tsunami encoder too. It was nero 2? nero3? that finally start accepting less-compliant mpegs lol (adaptec vcd creator was more strict lol).
yea, those were the days, lol... thx god theyre gone

[Poppa_Meth]

I've already got the lastest version of Nero 5.5 to put on it. I don't want to try 6. I think that may be pushing things a bit and there really isn't anything 6 has that 5.5 doesn't that he'd be needing.

[Poppa_Meth]

anyone have any recommendations for memory brand? PC100 Memory is ridiculously expensive now. I've seen a 128MB PNY stick for about $40 thats gotten good reviews. The brands I'm use to looking for don't seem to offer anything lower than PC133 anymore.

[handyguy]

Slower computers are just fine but don't expect to write at 52x.

[indolikaa]

drive was HP superfast 2xWORM hehe - anyone remember what it stand for?

Write-Once, Read-Many.

[henry_nettles]

Slower computers are just fine but don't expect to write at 52x.

I used to have a 12x cd recorder, on a PII 266 mhz pc. It worked fine.

Later on, I helped a friend with an older computer. He had installed a 48x cd recorder in a pc with an AMD K6/2 400 mhz cpu. It was taking 30 minutes to write a CD. After I showed him how to limit the burn speed to 12x, everything worked much better.

[DereX888]

indolikaa wrote:

DereX888 wrote:
drive was HP superfast 2xWORM hehe - anyone remember what it stand for?

Write-Once, Read-Many.

We have a winner
I'm sending her with the prize to your desktop...

[Poppa_Meth]

Yeah I figure its not going to touch 52x. I'm gonna start at 12 or 16 and see how good it'll do. 16x will still burn a whole cd in 5 minutes. Its alot better that my old 4x burner that took about 20 minutes to burn.

[fmctm1sw]

Then you'll have what my old box has now (192MB)

I actually have 2x128MB sticks there, but it only shows 192MB, either its the bios limit, or somethin else, I probably should ask here does any1 know PB-795 (i think thats what is there) mobo's memory limit hehe 8)

You probably bought high density RAM and your computer is can only recognize half of it. That's what happened to me. I paid for a 128MB stick and can only use 64MB

[Poppa_Meth]

found an old chip of 64MB PC100 and plugged it in. up to 128 total now. Installed a Sony drive since they had it on special locally. Latest version of Nero 5 as well. Works perfectly. I've done a full 1:1 copy in Clone CD on it at 12x with no problems. I'll let him experiment with higher speeds. It took about 6 minutes to rip and 5 to write. A bit odd. I notice don read the buffers were constantly at 0-4% but on write they stayed right around 90-100%

[ZippyP.]

Have fun stormin' the castle!

-Think it'll work?

-It would take a miracle.

[DereX888]

fmctm1sw wrote:

You probably bought high density RAM and your computer is can only recognize half of it.

This mobo is at least 6-7 years old, so thats probably it.

Poppa_Meth wrote:

I've done a full 1:1 copy in Clone CD on it at 12x with no problems. I'll let him experiment with higher speeds. It took about 6 minutes to rip and 5 to write. A bit odd.

Ripping speed depends mostly on settings you have in CCD (which template you use), but also on the -rom drive's capabilities. Some drives advertised as 56x read speed barely reach 10x when reading CD-Rs or f***d up protected CDs.
Writing speed will depend mostly on your system's "bottleneck" (how fast is hdd's data output, and how fast this system can transfer data from hdd to ram and from ram to drive - chipset brand and model is the key factor here), but you should be able to hit 24X writing speed IMO.
Also I remember Win95 or 98 had some default setting limiting or slowering data transfer, but I dont recall any details ATM (been long time since I touch any 9x...).
Make sure you have DMA on hard drive and on writer turned on, coz AFAIR Win9x always kept it off by default.

[Poppa_Meth]

yeah I set DMA mode as soon as I installed it. I'll mess around with it a bit more when I get a chance. He's never owned a computer before so I don't think he has much to complain about. Just hope he doesn't screw something up and force me to rework the whole thing again!

[stiltman]

yeah I set DMA mode as soon as I installed it. I'll mess around with it a bit more when I get a chance. He's never owned a computer before so I don't think he has much to complain about. Just hope he doesn't screw something up and force me to rework the whole thing again!

Ghost image to CD

[Poppa_Meth]

Yeah I was thinking of that. I've got a copy of Ghost around here somewhere. Just gotta dig through all the discs to find it. I think if I spread all my discs out it would look like the inside of a disco ball in here.

[DereX888]

Im sure there is a way (for Windows 9x) to f***k up its ghost image too, somehow, anyhow
Your friend really dont want win2K or better yet some flavor of linux? IMO its a perfect machine for it.

[Poppa_Meth]

I'm sure he wouldn't want to mess with linux. He has enough trouble with point and click. I haven't messed with linux myself so I wouldn't be able to help him out with that one. May give Win2K a shot sometime. I think I have that around here too.