The +/- formats are competition generated like the recent DVD contest which BlueRay won, or even farther back the beta vs VHS conflict. Today most DVD units read and/or write both formats. My most recent reading reported minus was the more prevalent of the two. Personally I do not like any RW to use for permanent storage. I have to at times use copied video, audio and text at work. Several times a year RWs which have been rewritten on several times fail; CD and DVD. Not too often, but they do fail. Without knowing what brand and model of DVD burner along with the software you intend to use, my initial position is as long as the disk is amendable you should be able to continue using it for additional storage. DA

This is a duplicate of this thread. Try to keep it to one thread so we can get all the questions and ansers in one place.

I tried my first (and only) DVD program. Asimov's Planetarium. It was a little jerky. A couple of years back I increased to 1.2 GB of RAM. Does anyone think I should get more? Thanks, again, to all. Gene Ah, that age old question to which there is not a definite answer. You said this computer is 6 year old so anything you buy today for it might not be useable in the next machine. Memory is dirt cheap these days, however you have 1.2 gigs and if you have XP then 2gigs is the limit assuming your motherboard can accept that. It should be, but wisdom suggests to check first. How many sticks and what size are the ones installed? Probably a 1gig and a 256 meg A better graphics/video card would work wonders but again, If you current motherboard has only PCI (not PCIe) or AGP the new card will be no use in a newer machine later on.

You do have a DVDRW? Just a DVD drive will not burn disks. You can check in your Device Manager if you are not sure. A Ripper is software that will copy data from a DVD (or CD) to your hard drive.