Can I upgrade my laptop to play DVDs?
 

My laptop is kind of old, but it enough for my limited needs. 800 Mhz, 256 ram, 20 GB HD. I found I can buy a CDRW/DVD combo drive designed for it for $100, 24x24x24. I wonder at what about burn speed I can expect from such a computer...I mean, will this take about 1 hour to burn a full ISO...and could even manage to play a DVD movie without that being very choppy? It runs SuSE.

I have DVD drives in similar systems, never had an issue with watching a movie, even when doing other things. No idea about burning though, my burners are in newer stuff, but I can't imagine the speed of the system being too much of a bottle neck. Creating ISO's will take a while on old systems, but burning an ISO shouldn't take any longer.

Hi,

You should not have a problem with burning. Since you didn't provide system specifications we are shooting in the dark here. The system will work at that speed. As stated before the making of a iso will be the bottleneck not the burning of the image. You should look at increasing the RAM as that will be factor in your play back.

This will hold true for compiling of anything on this system, the more RAM you have will expedite.

Heck, I've got slower machines then yours that play dvd without problems. If I load processes then that will cause a problem with hickups for a dvd playing.