CD Writer advice please

[roach]

I am having trouble finding a CD W/CD RW due to the low spec on my computer. Does anyone have any helpful suggestions. I am using W98 ( original version ) 300 Mhz, P 11, 192 Mg RAM and want to write to CD to back up docs and write from a digital camera. The boys at PC World have not been much help!
Thanks.

[BDiONU]

I too have a PII 300 but have no problems using a CD writer (although 128Mb RAM might be helping, RAM is VERY cheap right now!). I would buy whatever you can afford and at the moment the hot word is the Asus CRW-4816A at about £54 inc VAT. Comes with Nero 5.5 which is what I use, does CD-R and CD-RW.

[bblank]

Half a year ago I bought a CD burner for my P (I) 200 Mhz 64Mb RAM Win95 box.
Works fine. It is Hi-Val H161040A-15R. (I'm also using Hi-Val's CD Rom and
floppy drives as replacements for my originals which have died.)

The specs are 16x/10x/40x, system requirements are minimal, the package
includes Nero.

The web page (http://www.hival.com/) doesn't seem to be working now.

[Background Noise]

You should be able to run a CD R/RW on that spec. You won't have inherent windows support for the new drive probably so you'll want a driver disc included with the drive (as well as burning software). There could be a hardware limitation - you need a power supply to the drive and a data cable. Unless your computer is very old or an oddity the motherboard should support an additional IDE device but you may need a new IDE cable to connect the drive and I would expect there to be a spare power cable or two from the power supply.

Once it's in you might find you can't take full advantage of it's highest write speed for instance if your existing drives don't read fast enough to supply data at the required rate - this would be most apparent when copying from CD to CD R - but from HDD to CD R should work fine.

You can get CD R/RW drives from about £35 upwards

[Spitoon]

I haven't been in the market for a CD drive for a while but from what I recall you probably want to look out for Burnproof technology or something similar (it's called different things by different manufacturers). It's possible they all come with it these days but it stoped the buffer underrun problem that could easily occur on a relatively slow machine like the one you want to use it with.