I have a P2-350Mhz, 384Mb PC100 mem and a 4Mb ATI Rage OnBoard graphics card. can't really afford another PC and my current one has been upgraded to its max near enougth.

I want to rip some DVD's using this system, but was wondering if these specs would work using a DVDRW & video capture card?

Here are the specs needed for the NEC 2500a etc....

DvD Burner ND-Series - System Requirements (pc)




Requirements for burning DvD+R(RW) / DvD-R(RW) / CD-R(RW) medias:
-min Pentium II 266MHz
-min 10GB harddiskspace
-min 64MB RAM

Requirements for DvD Video authoring:
-Windows 98se/ME/2000/XP
-min Pentium III 500MHz
-min 256MB RAM
-AGP Video card with 8MB RAM
-min 10GB harddiskspace

Requirements for Video captureing:
-Windows 98se/ME/2000/XP
-min Pentium III 800MHz
-min 256MB RAM
-AGP Video card with 8MB RAM
-capturing device (analog Video input or DV input)
-min 10GB harddiskspace

i think a lot of it will be handleing the file size issues! this machine is not much good for xp, and i doubt you are running nt, so with no ntfs you will struggle!

poop... NTFS better for ripping then? Using my specs, wouldn't it just take longer to rip, or do I risk it not working at all? What if I was to get a decent PCI graphics card? Even if I was to use lower quality ripping settings?

Grahpics card has nothing to do with ripping.
Filesize will only come into it if you are converting or editing movies, not ripping. As most ripping software makes the .VOB files 1 gig or less.
So Fat 32 will be ok.