macphoria - ignore all the silly advise by the previous posters. what you need is more memory, and/or a faster hard drive. to me, stopping everything else that i am doing to burn a disk is unacceptable! this is not OS 9 anymore damnit. OS X can do this, but your hardware is lacking (sorry). as a minimum, you should have 512MB of RAM. you don't have folding or SETI or anything else running (web server or samba or anything also) do you? OS X can do many cool things, but it wants the memory to do it with. if your hard drive is 5400rpm, then i suggest 7200rpm as well.