Still looking to get that 'puter up to speed

Just 3 more items and I'll have it to the point where I've been wanting.

Though tonight I ran into another problem with InfraRecorder. I'll
remind people on how it doesn't like strange characters in filenames
when being run in English, and it'll either happen during the making of
the image to burn (requiring a rename or compressed into an archive
file), or it'll crash during verifying the disk after it's been made. It
also doesn't like needlessly long filenames, also known to make the
program exit during a disk verify.

I was trying to put some MP3s onto a CD as an Audio CD. Some of the
files were 6 seconds in length. InfraRecorder kept coming up with some
stupid error that the Lead In track was unable to be burned. So,
thinking maybe it's the media, I try a disk of a different brand. Still
get that same damn frustrating error! So on another guess, maybe it's
the length of the tracks. I remember the Real Networks player wouldn't
burn RealAudio files to CD that were less than 10 seconds for some
stupid reason (they'll encode but not burn? Does that make any freakin'
sense?) so I decide to set up a project without them. The Disk Burns
just fine.

OK, so try to make a project with just the short tracks in it, no dice.

(obscenities fly)

So later on, I thought wait, Windows Media Player, for all intents and
purposes, does have some CD burning functionality. Some mutated form of
Roxio Light. Through its convoluted user interface, I managed to get it
to find the MP3s I want to work with, put them in a playlist to burn to
CD, and got the CD to burn. With my short tracks and all.

The Main reason I wanted to use InfraRecorder is that it doesn't insert
an additional 2 second gap between tracks. WMP does and there doesn't
seem to be any setting to get it to stop that unless it's a registry
edit.

Got the Playstation emulator to run the first time, requiring a few more
tweaks to get things just about right. The CD burner can read game disks
fast enough to keep up.

Copied some video files onto the hard drive in anticipation of being
able to actually make a DVD with them at some point soon.

Had to turn off Hardware Acceleration of video in VLC to get it to stop
putting crap on the right side of one video it was playing. Still works
fine.

But XP still has a problem of getting ahold of an external storage
device on USB and not letting it be stopped. I've turned off indexing
for those drives anyway, so it better not be that anymore.