Try a few initial recordings to see what your soundcard is like. Soundcards vary hugely in quality - the built-in one on my mobo is a real Hissing Sid but the ISA one I use instead is fine. Other ppl have experienced the exact opposite!

Plenty of free sound recording and editting packages - don't bother with the MS one unless you're really stuck. I use SoundForge and that's pretty good; a friend swears by Goldwave. There's always a few on magazine coverdisks.

Once you've got the sound recorded, it's a good idea to put it through a de-hiss filter if the recording is a bit crackly. All decent sound packages have filtering on them to do this, but it takes a fair bit of processing power, so expect to have to wait a bit on slower machines with less RAM.

Then just write it to CD. If you want an audio CD, it's best to write all the tracks at once, otherwise the CD can do strange things. If you're saving them on the CD as MP3 or WAV then it doesn't matter, just use the CD as a normal data CD. Every CD-writer comes with software to let you make audio and data CDs, so just follow the instructions.

On Win95 (the ones I've tried, at least), the CD-writer doesn't work properly above a 2x write - the hard disk simply can't transfer the data fast enough. Win98 (and maybe some Win95 drivers if you're lucky) lets you use DMA to transfer the data quicker, so 4x writes should be OK on that. As guest says, occasionally it does go pear-shaped, so don't worry about losing a few CDs, especially at higher write speeds.

Grab.