I am looking to buy a DVD burner for my computer. Most that I see burn at 16x require a Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or higher CPU. I am unsure if these will run on my computer.

During startup, I get a message stating that I have an AMD Duran 900 MHz processor. I guess that means that I do not have a processor with enough MHz. So what would be the consequences of having a 900 MHz processor instead of a 1.3 GHz processor? Would I not be able to watch DVDs? Would I have to burn at a much slower speed that the one advertised?

My specs surpass all of the other requirements for these burners.

You should have no problem watching DVDs, provided you have a program that can show you DVDs. The only thing to be concerned about is burning DVDs. Your AMD 900 MHz is about 2/3rds the speed of a P4 1.3 GHz, so if you burn at 8X instead of 16X your processor should be able to keep up.

However, there are other factors to consider, such as IDE/SCSI bus transfer rate. You probably want to find or create a very large file on your hard drive, and then copy that file to a dummy copy, again on your hard drive. From there, you want to compute the average transfer rate of your IDE/SCSI bus (i.e. (file's size)/(file copy time)), divide that number by 4 and then again by the MBs/sec that a DVD 1X is (I don't know the figure off hand). I suspect that what you get from that will be less than 8X. In any case, you want to use the lesser of the 2 numbers as your DVD burn speed. Also, you always want to create a disk image of the DVD that you want to burn first and then burn that to the DVD, to help avoid having your hard drive do a lot of head thrashing.

i recommend going to fry's electronics. use k3b. burn at 1x speed.

If you do go to frys electronics, you want to avoid frys regurgitated resale items. Frys is famous for taking back items that a customer has been able to use for 30 days and then selling them again as if they were brand new. You don;t want to buy such an item.