I purchased a DVD making package which works great. Problem: When trying to burn project to DVD (encoding) it takes forever; left my computer for about 26 hours and it was not finished yet; I'm using an external DVD burner which works fine; what is it about making a DVD (movie files) that takes so long? How can this be fixed?

Although 26 hours is excessive the combination of only a 1.13GHz processor and only 512MB RAM would suggest the required time. To make a DVD it takes a lot of work for the processor and requires a lot of RAM. There are two processes that take place and they both take about the same amount of time to complete; converting and burning. Different burning software makers make claim to perform teh converting faster then others so your burning software maybe could be improved or even change it's settings to speed up the process some. Your machine does meet the minimum requires to burn DVDs but most of what I read suggests or recommends at leat a 1.4GHz processor and 512MB of RAM. However, 2.4GHz with 1GB of RAM speeds it up nicely. You might try defragging the system. If possible store the video to be burned on a separate partition from which the burning application is running from. Naturally, don't be using the PC for anything else while burning. Perhaps you can get your burning time down to an overnight process instead of 26 hours. HTH Bryan

I agree with Bryan. You might want to shut down everything running in the background when you are doing the burn. If you are not connected to the Internet you can safely temporarily disable your anti-virus and firewall. But don't forget to re-enable them when finished burning. I wonder if you have some malware slowing down your system. Check the Security and Virus forum for software to eliminate it. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!!!