ROBERT SAYRE wrote in a message to CHARLES ANGELICH:

WC>> By the time I get around to a CD burner DVD burners may be 
WC>> affordable?

RS> The darned things take a 600MHz or better PC plus Win98 or higher. 
RS> Unless things change in newer DVD burners, I'll probably never have 
RS> one.

CA> --8<--cut

CA> I can't say what the minimum CPU speed would be but I do know that 
CA> my daughter was burning CDs on her 450mhz machine and making few, 
CA> if any, coasters.

RS>  I'm assuming you mean DVD's?

RS>  The speed info that I got was from looking at the minimum 
RS> requirements for drives that I was interested in.

CA> Funny thing about DVD burners - to make DVD copies you need 5 gig 
CA> of free hard drive space for the ISO. I hadn't thought about that 
CA> until I was reading some DVD-RW advertisements. For me, this is 
CA> funny since I use an 850 meg hard drive right now.

RS>  FWIU, it takes a long time and a lot of room to prepare a movie 
RS> for the DVD. Something like 4 times as long as the movie runs. (A 
RS> 15 minute movie takes 1 hour to burn). I assume that this process 
RS> is also what eats up CPU cycles.

I was going to post about the requirements for a cd burner,  and this seems
to be as good a place as any to jump in here...    

I've been thinking about getting a burner for some time now.  So today I
stopped by an Office Max store,  since they'd been advertising one for
insanely low prices ($19.95 after rebates).  I had to ask the guy for
"the cheap one",  and looked at the box a bit,  to see what they
had for system requirements on there.  Unfortunately,  the minimum system
required to support the drive (whose name and numbers I don't happen to
recall,  unfortunately) was a P-II / 350,  which is considerably faster
than anything I happen to have here.

I'm not sure if that "minimum system requirement" is a matter of
running windoze and the software that they give you,  or if it's something
else.

I also found out that the drive I was looking at wasn't the one that was as
cheap as I'd been looking for,  but would've ended up costing me twice as
much ($39.95,  after rebates) and I would've had to lay out almost four
times as much cash,  since the mail-in part of the rebate was bigger as
well.  That being the case,  and me being unsure as to whether I could
actually support the drive or not,  I passed on it today,  and figure to
research this a bit.

Now,  first consideration here is the fact that the fastest machine I have
on hand is a K6-200.  Also got a P200 handy that I'm not doing much with. 
I don't know if this is going to be fast enough or not.  Second
consideration that comes to mind is that I'll probably be running this
under linux,  not windoze,  which I expect is going to have some effect on
this.

Also,  can you slow these things down?  I know that the big deal these days
is to get the fastest writing speed you can,  etc. but if they can be run
at slower speeds wouldn't that work for a slower machine?

Comments,  all?  :-) 

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