Barbara, do you make sure all other programs running in the background (including virus scanners, etc.) are shut off? I used CoolEdit on my old Win95 computer (Pentium chip 166MHz and 32 megs RAM) and it worked fine, if slowly. Did plenty of soundfile editing on it, including transferring old cassette indies to CD-R format.

Sometimes I would get pops from ripped tracks, but I could generally fix them in CoolEdit (or else re-rip the file if it was really bad). That software allowed you to "zoom" into the individual samples (there are over 44 thousand of them per second in a "CD Quality wav file) and drag them down in line with surrounding samples or else delete bad sections, usually with no ill effect to the music if the deleted selection is small enough. Playing around with that software teaches you a lot about digital music recording, to the point you can spot problems just by looking at the graphical representation of the wav file.

De-fragging is good too, As Bill D suggested. With my old computer, to avoid buffer underrruns and popping on the destination CD-R, I always saved the files to the computer first, in a special partition on my second hard drive, and de-fragged that partition before burning the new CD-R. I used no more than a 4x burning speed too. It always worked perfectly.