Babbage Coming Back Up, DVD Burner Problems

My school machine, the 500MHz is coming back into a state of usefulness. I try to do an average of one new program per day, letting it compile over night. Two days ago I got gaim installed, and yesterday was liferea. Today I will be looking around at different word processing programs (OO.org or Abiword or something else?) and I also have to get something for calendaring and todo-listing. Doing 1280x1024 on a 15" screen is also quite different and sometimes hard to see the smaller fonts.

Approximately a month ago I bought a DVD burner. There are so many files on my hard drive that are over 700MB that I would like to burn off, and I also want to convert the two dozen 8mm tapes in our house to DVD video. The burner I ended up buying was the Samsung DVD+-RW 16x DL burner (TSSTcorp TS-H552U) through NCIX for $60+tax. For my first media I bought ten Mitsumi DVD-R 4.7GB 4x discs at Futureshop. As of this morning I have burned all ten discs, and every single one of them has data errors. They aren't complete coasters, but in my mind, they are. I have used Nero 6.6.0.13, Adobe Premiere's built-in burner, DeepBurner, and Cheetah DVD Burner. I think it's safe to say that it isn't the fault of the burning program. I will have to go out to the stores and buy some more media (different brand this time) and try those. If they don't work, I will plunk this drive into the 500MHz Gentoo machine, and see what it can do.

I do hope that I can somehow get this thing to work.