I am looking to add a DVD burner to my computer:

PII 400mhz (wowza thats fast!)
Win98 SE

The plextor drive I am looking at says it needs
a PIII 800mhz. (no response yet from plextor support)

Is it possible to still do DVD burning with my slow and old machine?

I have read that it is possible, but you will not be able to take advantage of the drives max speeds....

If not possible I should be able to use a DVD ROM to rip the movies on to my Hard drive for later burning....right?

 

You'll probably end up with a lot of errors if you go below the minimium specs. A friend of mine did this with a CD burner, and it did not go well. I would assume DVD burning would turn out similar.

 

Tech support emailed me back....no go..

 

Yeah unfortunately you usually can't cheat minimium specs. When they say minimium it usually means that everything they tested it on that was lower did not work worth a damn!

 

You will be fine, just don't run anything in the background, I have my cousins pc P2 350 I think it is, win xp 256 ram I think... and he doesn't have any problems just takes longer to encode the video... How much ram do u have in your computer?

[ January 28, 2005, 07:17 AM: Message edited by: ChizzerZ24 ]

 

Yeah, a DVD burner on that spec of machine will likely provide you with some coasters, even at the slower speeds. The DVD-Rs don't yet have the "burn-proof" technology that the CD-Rs do, so if it looses communication for a fraction of a second, you are toast.

Mark

 

128mb ram....

 

The only way I would see it possible is how Chizzer mentioned. Run it on the lowest speed and don't have ANYTHING running in the background that may interfere with it that includes any virus programs, disable it till the burning process is done. A fresh reboot will always help.

And you can rip DVD's to the Hard drive with the DVDROM yes, DVD Shrink does this quite well.

Or generally.... Buy a new computer.

[ January 28, 2005, 11:58 AM: Message edited by: Blind d(-_-)b ]

 

Cool.

I might just get a new 120gb harddrive now and a dvd rom (can get for under $100) and start ripping movies to my harddrive.

Beats shelling out the big bucks to buy a new computer right now...

 

Add another 128 ram u will be fine, the burner I sold my cousin was a 4x and hasn't made one coaster yet so if is p 2 350 can do it ur P3 450 will do it... He also keeps it burning at 4x he didn't slow it down at all either...

[ January 29, 2005, 09:21 AM: Message edited by: ChizzerZ24 ]