Hi, sorry if this question has been asked before.
I want to buy a second hand laptop, around 700mhz PIII with 256meg ram 15g
HHD, and a DVD rom.
My question is, if I add an external DVD burner, can I burn a DVD straight
from the DVD rom to the DVD burner, or do I have to transfer all of the
information to my hard drive first.
Generally they always say things work smoother especially on slower
systems when you copy it to the HD and then burn. With buffer underrun
technology that prevents problems in that area you can get away with a
lot though I dont think Id want to use a system that was always
depending on it , since it was so marginal.
Actually people have posted with CD burners and DVD burners theyve
used surprisingly ancient systems often lower than the makers
recommend as the min system to use and claim it still worked OK.
Obviously youll only know if you try it.
However the min requirement from manufacturers range on externals
from 350 Pent III to 800 Pent III. Some recommend using your HD.
I dont see any big deal copying to your HD. Theoretically if someone
wanted to backup some DVD movies they had which would be wrong cause
copying is illegal and in no way am I condoning such an act. However
Ive done it just to test it of course. In fact I did it with when I as
stuck with my old Athlon XP 1 gig just to see how bad it would be and
it wasnt bad at all.
What you would do is use DVD decryptor which copies all the files on
the DVD to your HD would take 4-8 gigs. This program is free.
Then use DVDtoOne to shrink it down - if it needs shrinking down of
course to fit on a writable which has far less capacity than the store
bought DVD movie. Depending on the size , it may take 15-25 min and
how wimpy your PC is . Yours may take longer. How much longer I cant
say. I was surprised actually that my 1 gig athlon was slower but not
eons slower than my old 3200 XP athlon and actually not even my
current AMD 64 3000.
Then use NERO to burn. It should take around
15-20 min to rip . 15-35 min to compress though its hard to say for
your system. 15-20 min to burn though once again your external burner
maybe slower.
Theres a completely free program called DVDShrink which cpies and
shrinks in one prog. I tried it a while ago and didnt like it and
several have said its slower than DVD2one but then you have to pay for
DVD2one.