How fast does the PC need to be?
Some people will tell you that the latest hardware is needed for strenuous CD-R work. In reality, even a medium powered 486 system is more than sufficient for CD writing duty. I’d recommend at least a Pentium 100 with 32MB of RAM and a big hard drive for storing your audio data on (you’ll chew through gigabytes easily, trust me). But if you follow the rest of the advice here, even a low powered system should work just fine. Faster computers are quite helpful if you’ll be editing audio, which is more difficult than almost anything else you can do on a computer. What about thermal recalibrating hard drives? Older hard drive units used to pause periodically to do what’s called thermal recalibration. They would take a break and not spit out any data for a little bit as they adjusted themselves. With today’s software and CD recording hardware buffering, even a fairly long recalibration pause shouldn’t effect your recording. Hard drives with an audio/video (AV) rating are nice in that they t
