It takes my dvd burner 3 hours to make a Cd. Is there any faster way to do this?

Question

I have an Emachine T3990 with an 80GB hard Drive and 335 Intel Celeron Processor. The Programs I use to burn dvds are Nero 7 and InterVideo WinDVD creator 2.

Does the speed of my computer have something to do with it or is it just the programs im using?

Answer 1

More likely than the "speed" of your computer are how your DVD burner is connected, how fragmented your system's harddrive is, and how much physical memory (RAM) your computer has available.

Things to check:
1. Are your harddrive and cdrom drive connected to a single IDE cable? (inside of your computer case, the IDE cable is a thick, flat cable, usually but not always grey in colour). Most computers can support two IDE channels (two IDE cables), for optimum performance, your DVD/CD burner and your harddrive should be on separate cables. This is NOT applicable for a laptop, only for desktop computers.

2. Assuming you're running Microsoft Windows, check if your filesystem needs to be defragmented. This can be done under Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter (reference to documentation provided below)

3. How much RAM do you have? If your system has less than 512mb of memory, you may wish to upgrade -- even 512mb is now "cutting it close" with modern software, I recommend no less than 1gb.

Answer 2

It's most likely the 335 Intel Celeron that slows down the process.
On some older Celerons it takes as log as 5 or 6 hours.
They were not engineered for multitasking & true multimedia processing.

Nero 7 is about as fast as it gets.

Also, are you pehaps encoding an AVI file to DVD format during the process ? This would explain it even more.

regards,
Philip T