Mark -

The most likely thing I can speculate is that if you're still running Win98SE, your machine may still have "plain vanilla" USB port(s). Even though the CD burner is USB-2, it will slow down to the older USB spec if the machine's port doesn't support the newer high speed. The difference is between (theoretical) 10MB/sec and 100MB/sec data rates, although actuals usually run about a third to one-half of the "rated" values.

Prior to USB-2, USB CD burners were limited to about 12x due to this slower data rate.

Even if your burner is rated at 52x, it won't write faster than the rated speed of the blank disk you're using for that burn (Nero won't let it). 52x blanks are available, but they're rare in my local market, with 32x and 48x the most commonly available. Nero does give you the option of burning at any rate lower than the lowest of the burner/disk ratings, so you might try setting back to something like 10x or so to see if it's just a data-bus rate limit. Even at 10x, an 80 minute CD (700+ MB) burned as a data CD shouldn't take more than 10 minutes or so.

You should be able to tell if your machine has a USB or USB-2 rated port by looking in Control Panel/Device Manager. I'd have to resurrect an old machine to check details on the quickest way to get there in Win98, but you should be able to find it fairly easily.

If you do have an old USB port, you can get plug in USB-2 port adapters fairly reasonably, and they should be a Plug-and-Play installation with Win98 - although you will have to go inside the case.

If you find that you already have USB-2 on the machine, there's the possility that another USB device (printer, scanner, ext HD, etc) that's to the older spec may be dragging the bus speed down intermittently. Although that's not supposed to happen - it can, so it'd be another thing to check out.

John