What do I need?

[stlkenny]

[B]Hello,

My name is Kenny, I'm 58 and new to computers. What I would like to know is what do I have to do and get to make disc copies of movies or just anything. What software and devices do I have to get and the cheapest way if possible. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated. Thank you.[/B]

[Whappo]

Aside from a DVD burner and some decrypting/ripping/burning programs you will need some good blank DVD’s. Verbatim (MIT, made in Taiwan) are pretty good.
A little information from you would help. What brand/model PC do you have? What operating system do you use? If you know the cpu speed, amount of ram, hard disk drive, any optical drives you may have now,etc. There are tutorials here at CDFreaks for copying/burning/editing, etc. Just scroll down the main forums page and you will find them.

[stlkenny]

Hello Whappo,

I bought my computer used, it is a Pentium 2, has 320MB of Ram, I have Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3. It has a Maxtor disk drive. DVD/CD drive is a Samsung CD-Rom-SC 140B

It is a rather old computer. What type of burner should I get.

Thanks for the help,

stlkenny

[Whappo]

Gee! The slowest pentium II is 233Mhz while the frastest is 450Mhz. To be perfectly honest I’ve never tried to burn a DVD on anything lower than a 1Ghz pentium III. Maybe someone else on this forum has experience burning with a P2. Your ram is probably sufficient, but 512 would be better seeing that your using XP. The thing that is most important is getting the data from your hard drive to the burner fast enough to prevent buffer underrun. You won’t get a good burn if the burner has to stop/start all the time. Your drive could be using an ATA 33 interface, I don’t know. You can get a decent burner online at Newegg for about 25$, but in your case you might want to buy local so it will be easier to return if your pc doesn’t have the horsepower to get a decent burn. You will need one that has an IDE connection, you do NOT want SATA. Another thing to consider is your computer’s power supply, a DVD burner requires more power than a CD rom drive and given the specs of your pc the power supply might not be enough to handle a burner.

[cholla]

My old PC has a 450Mhz Pentium III & Windows 98SE .It has done many succesful burns with only 192MB of RAM.It has two harddrives the original 13.5GB & an 80GB I added.If you only have a small hard drive then you are probably going to need a second one.
I have added some RAM & it now has 768MB the max for this motherboard.
The burner is a Hammer (Panasonic - Matshita)
My only complaint with it is you can’t Bookset it to DVD-ROM.
I intend to repalce that drive with one I can Bookset.

The main thing with the older PC’s like this is when burning a DVD is have all other programs shut down.In other words Crtl/Alt/Delete down to Explorer & Systray & the burning software.Don’t do any other tasks while burning.

[beef_barley]

When you get what you need, here is an option for Dvd backup. Posts #67 to #74, but please also read Posts #77 & #78.

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f116/dvdfab-5-0-2-2-not-ready-big-league-245636/index3.html