I got a HI-VAL CD-RW drive for Christmas. The minimum requirements state that a 350mhz processor is needed. We have two antient computers. One, is 333mhz, which is close enough, but my wife wants me to install it in the other computer, which is 233mhz.
Will that even work? I mean, if it runs slowly, that’ll be fine, and I know that I can just hook it up and see, but I just wanted to try to get an answer first before installing it and finding out that it was in vain.
Thanks.
You may get errors (meaning you’ll make a lot of coasters instead of CD’s) if you burn at the higher rates. If you are on a cable modem, you may also get errors if the computer gets busy dealing with internet traffic. If you keep the burn rate low and don’t have the computer busy doing other things, then it should work.
Reading CDs won’t be a problem.
My WAG is that the minimum speed requirement may have to do with memory management issues, my theory being that slower processors wouldn’t be able to support the management structure that the CD-RW – and/or its supporting software – needs to maintain the constant flow of data it needs for a successful burn. Sufficient RAM, on the other hand, would seem to be a more critical requirement…
Worst case, you can “just hook it up and see,” as you mentioned, and you’ll create some shiny coasters before you give it up. Your old processor won’t melt down or anything… probably…
Thanks to both of you. Since my wife is totally insistant that I don’t put it on the faster computer, I guess that I’m left with no choise but to put it on the slower one. I’ll just remember to record slower.
Oh, and engineer_comp_geek
Yeah, actually, I’m not worried about reading. Hell, I at least have a CD ROM already installed. Writing is the only thing I’m worried about, but hopefully slow speeds should do the trick.
Oh, one last question. A CD-R disk can be made to be read by anything, even an audio CD player, but a CD-RW disk can only be read by CD-RW drives, right? (I’m slightly confused on this issue)
Thanks.
CD-R/W discs can also be read by audio CD and DVD drives if those drives are designed to do so. Product packaging for these devices will tell you if they are capable of reading CD-R/W media.
As a side note, to read CD-R/W media on non-burning CD-ROM drives you may need to install UDF packet reading software on your PC.
If the new drive has “BURN-proofing” (and I’d be amazed if it didn’t), then you won’t have a problem. Even if the computer is woefully unable to feed the drive information at a speed the drive s comfortable with, the drive can “idle” and not waste the disk.
My father 24x CD-RW in a 200MHz comptuer. Writing disks is slow, but coasters are rare (usually they only occur when something is wrong with the original disk).
My first CD burner was 2x speed and connected to a 75Mhz Pentium. (I kept thinking to myself for years: How come people don’t realize they can burn music CDs with these and …?)
On a slower machine:
Burn at a lower speed. Some experimentation will be required. Some burning software will do speed tests and set the speed for you. Unfortunately, that isn’t as great as it sounds.
Don’t run anything but the burning software at the same time. Most people have dozens of useless or worse startup programs slowing their machines down. You can clean nearly every one out. Anti-virus, messenger, system checkers, Internet “accelerators”, etc. Kill them now regardless of CD writing.
This burner is 52x24x52x.
It came with one CD-R disk. I put together a group of songs to burn. I could choose 16x, 12x, or 8x speed. I tried 16x. I couldn’t write in that speed (so the error message told me), and since you can only write once to a CD-R, it’s now ruined and I have to wait till tomorrow to buy more disks to try again. But this time it’ll be at 8x.
Oh, and for the CD-R VS CD-RW the Nero Wizard (Nero being the CD burning program) it says “For Audio compilations the use of CD-RWs is not recommended, since many Audio CD players will not be able to read these CDs.” So I think that I’ll play it safe and stick to CD-Rs for audio disks.