computer question - dvd burner on old computer?

[gizmo]

Sorry about posting computer questions here, but I have had excellent advice on computer questions here in the past.

I am resurrecting an old Pentium 2 350 desktop computer. I think it has about 500 or 600 Mb ram. It currently has only a cd rom drive, no burner.

I am contemplating fitting a dvd burner drive but have conflicting advice about whether this computer could cope with running a dvd burner.

I am using Puppy Linux. (and playing with other Linux distro live CDs including Dreamlinux.)

MY options are to fit a new Samsung cd burner (not DVD) which is only $9 and I assume should work fine; or to fit a new dvd burner for about $35. It will be an IDE drive.

Is this machine likely to cope with a dvd burner? If it struggles, what will be the symptoms? If it is only slow burning, I can cope with that. However if it is likely to cause crashes or misbehaviour, then I'd rather just go for the CD burner.

If I fit the DVD burner and dvd watching/burning turns out to be a problem, will it still burn CDs OK?

I'm not sure if the DVD burner manufacturers' recommendations for minumum hardware specs (P3 600) are based on running Windows and would it still run ok on a lesser machine with Puppy (or other light Linuxes) instead of Windows?

Thanks

Chris

 

[panthera]

Chris,

A DVD writer which has burn proof technology (won't spoil the raw DVD because of a buffer underrun) will work. A very fast HDD would help.

Check first whether Puppy can handle the drive you want to use.

Definitely be sure the drive is on its own IDE channel as "master". Use the fastest IDE access the motherboard permits.

 

[j2400]

The only real problem I see is with watching movie-type DVDs. I have a PIII running at about 750 mHz, and from my experience, it's marginally OK. Lower speed might be OK, since there may be other issues in that computer. But I'm not sure that going as low as a 350 mHz PII would be workable. Unless one really had a super fast Linux distro.

Quoted speed probably only considers Windows. Linux is usually not considered--plus there are too many variations on the Linux theme to come up with a one size fits all answer.

 

[panthera]

It's possible

if the graphics controller plays along. Otherwise, very iffy. But my understanding was, just burning?

Back in the days of i586, I had an adapter from Creative, Dx2 which played back MPEG as overlay and even decoded Dolby. Worked great, bound to be a few billion still out there on eBay...and there were Linux distros which worked with it.

 

[gizmo]

Yes, I'm not really interested in playing dvds on the computer, I have a dvd player connected to the TV. I may in future occasionally want to download and burn to dvd.

Thanks for your advice.

Chris.