What is an exespensive external DVD BURNER for a laptop?

[aristottle]

Hi guys, I have a travelmate 290e laptop, with 256megs of ram, its about a year and half old.....wondering how well a usb external dvd burner would work? Do I a have enough ram? how much better is firewire ( I have a firewire pcmcia card for the laptop)

I am looking for something inexspensive....dual layer dual format....what would you guys reccommend?

[Gen-An]

According to Acer's site, the 290e has Firewire built in, which would undoubtedly work much better with an external drive than a CardBus Firewire adapter. The USB2.0 ports on the machine should work as well. I would suggest upping RAM to at least 512MB just for the sake of running Windows well (1024MB is better). The Celeron M processor in the machine should provide plenty of CPU power for 16x burning over USB2.0 or IEEE1394.

[aristottle]

thanks for the reply....so are there any "issues" with burning while using a usb dvd burner?

And I was thinking about bumbing up the ram, my laptop will support up to two gigs, and right now has 1 256 meg card of ram in it.