Thanks, Rue. I did upgrade to the 1 gig cpu. I haven't noticed the dramatic improvement I was expecting. It definitely seems more brisk, but not by the leaps and bounds I was expecting. I guess I shouldn't complain, in effect, it seems like maybe it does the whole process at about 2x whereas before it was 1x. FWIW, I am running the -alt-preset extreme.

My bigger concern is the ripping part. As I noted in another post, I was extracting audio at a max of about 3x with my Plextor as a master on the secondary IDE. For other reasons, I needed to have it set as my slave temporarily on the same cable. At that point, the extraction rates jumped to 9x or more consistently. When I had to go back to having it be a master, the extraction speeds dropped down to what they had been previously. That strikes me as odd, and nobody has really been able to explain to me why that is.