>A friend/coworker of mine wants a CD-R to be installed on
>his Pentium 133.  He has a 6.8 GB hard drive and 64 MB of ram.
>After reading about Pam Leming's problems with a 200MHz,
>I wonder if he'll be spitting in the wind with an IDE drive.
>Are SCSI drives much more expensive?

   SCSI drives are quite a bit more moneywise and require a SCSI card.
But CD-R drives, the media disks, and burner software have all improved
quite a bit in the past two-three years. So even on an older machine
they should work OK. The trick is in learning how much you can push an
older machine for burning CDs. You may find copy to copy will not work
with a slow machine, but making disk images first and then copying will
work. The speed of burning may have to be reduced to 2X or 1X to make it
work. Certainly it's now almost foolproof burning CDs on a fast machine
(400 MHZ and faster with 128+ of RAM) even with IDE drives, but older
drives can still benefit from CD-R technology. I do agree Backward Bells
are very nasty to work on. *;-)


Later,

Russell Smith
http://www.rustysmith.com

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                  http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org