Windows 7 Annoyances

Optical Storage Annoyances

By most reckoning, optical media is dead. Sales of online digital music is growing while CDs are becoming scarce. Movies and TV shows are streamed online, often for free, raising questions about the usefulness of DVD (not to mention its late-to-the-game replacement, Blu-Ray). And why pay several dollars apiece for single-use 8.7GB dual-layer DVDs when you can get 32GB flash memory drives that can be used again and again?

And yet music is frequently less expensive when purchased on CD—particularly used—and DVDs are ubiquitous. There’s no better choice right now for archiving lots of data (like thousands of digital photos) for long-term storage. It’s typically more convenient to send gigabytes of data on a disc through postal mail than it is to struggle with online file-sharing services. And let’s not forget Windows itself, which comes on DVD.

Burning Discs

The first CD burner I ever saw was the size of a small microwave oven. It took 68 minutes to fill a 68-minute CD, and it produced more coasters than Six Flags. Suffice it to say, things have improved, although it’s a shame it’s taken this long. Windows 7 is the first version of Windows to include disc-burning features in Windows Explorer that actually work. (Show me a CD-R with readable data created by Windows Vista or XP and I’ll eat my hat.)

Here’s how it works:

1. Open Windows Explorer.

2. Place a blank disc in your burner, and close the drawer.

3. Highlight your CD/DVD drive in the tree, and the Burn a Disc window appears.

4. Name your new disc by typing up to 16 characters in the Disc title field [optional].

5. Select With a CD/DVD player.

   Warning

   The first option here, Like a USB flash drive, is misleading. This selection instructs Windows to format the disc with the Live File System, Microsoft’s name for the UDF (Universal Disk Format) “packet writing” filesystem. UDF was invented to address the frustrations of traditional CD burning programs that required you to assemble a list of all the files on a disc before you commence burning. But in Windows 7, you can drag files at your leisure, so it hardly makes a difference. Plus, despite Microsoft’s description in this window, UDF discs are not reliably readable in Windows XP without additional software; you’ll need Vista or later if you want to count on using this disc after you’re done with it here. To make a disc readable anywhere, choose the second option, With a CD/DVD player.

6. In the empty root folder of your new disc, you should see either “Files Ready to Be Written to the Disc” or “Drag files to this folder to add them to the disc.” In either case, you can treat this like any other drive: drag files onto it, create folders, and even delete.

   Note

   Windows doesn’t actually write any data to your disc until you click Burn to disc in the next step. Instead, it stores all dropped files in a temporary folder on your hard disk. You can clear the temporary folder, thereby resetting the disc project, by clicking the Delete temporary files button on the task ribbon at the top of Windows Explorer. (You can choose where temporary files are stored by right-clicking your optical drive and selecting Properties and then choosing the Recording tab. For this reason, you should never “move” files to a CD or DVD, but rather only copy them. If needed, you can delete the source files after you’ve burned the disc.

7. When you’re done, click the Burn to disc button on the task ribbon at the top of Windows Explorer and follow the prompts to complete the burn.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get a disc with your data on it. Eject it and then pop it back in to confirm your data is there. (If it still says “Files Ready to Be Written to the Disc” or “Drag files to this folder to add them to the disc,” click the Delete temporary files button; if your data remains, it’s on the disc.)

No luck with Windows’ built-in burning? Here are some alternatives:

Basic data DVD/CD burning

Try Express Burn, Ashampoo Burning Studio, PowerISO, or Nero Lite.

Audio CD

Use Windows Media Player or Apple iTunes to create a custom playlist and then burn the playlist to a disc.

DVD Movies

You can make DVD movies from your TV recordings within Windows Media Center, or burn edited movies from within Windows Live Movie Maker (the latter being a free download from within Windows Update).

ISO Image Files

Although not available through the Start menu, Windows 7 includes the Windows Disc Image Burner (isoburn.exe). Right-click any .iso file, select Open With, and then pick Windows Disc Image Burner from the list.

You can also use ISO Recorder (free; http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com) or PowerISO to burn discs from ISO image files, as well as create ISO files from discs.

Note

Don’t want to waste a disc? Try mounting an ISO as a virtual drive instead, and access its files in Windows Explorer as though it were a physical disc. Programs that can do this include Virtual CloneDrive (free, http://www.slysoft.com/) and MagicISO (free, http://www.magiciso.com/).

With the proper disc burning software, now all that can go wrong is everything else.

Split Huge Files for Storage

So, you’ve got 11 GB of data you need to fit on a 4.7 GB DVD (or 1 GB to fit on a 700 MB CD). The obvious solution is to zip up the data, but what if your data isn’t compressible?

Zip only takes you so far. If you’ve got gigabytes worth of videos, pictures, or music you want to put on a disc, zipping them up won’t help.

The solution is to use the RAR file format, for which you’ll need a program like WinRAR. RAR works like zip, but it can provide better compression with “solid archives” and can conveniently split large amounts of data into more-manageable chunks.

In WinRAR, navigate to the folder containing the files you want to archive. Click Add and then choose an archive filename. Turn on the Create solid archive option, and then from the Split to volumes list, select either CD700: 700 mb or DVD+R: 4481 mb. When you’re ready, click OK, and WinRAR will get to work.

When it’s done, you’ll have one or more large files that will fit nicely on one or more discs. Just include a copy of the WinRAR program on one of the discs so you can extract your files easily when you need to.

Stop Windows 7 from Burning Discs

There’s no question that having CD/DVD burning built-in to Windows Explorer is convenient, at least when it works. But if you primarily use a third-party burning application, Windows’ offers to format a blank disc can be a nuisance. Here’s how to disable CD Burning in Windows Explorer:

1. Open the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc); if you’re using Windows Home Premium and you don’t have the Group Policy Editor, see below.

2. Expand the branches to User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Explorer.

3. In the right pane, double click the Remove CD Burning features entry.

4. Click Enabled and then click OK.

5. The change should take effect immediately. Open Windows Explorer, right-click your CD/DVD burner, and select Properties. Confirm the normally-present Recording tab is no longer there.

To re-enable CD/DVD burning, return to the Remove CD Burning features window in Group Policy Editor, and select Not Configured.

If you don’t have Group Policy Editor, open Registry Editor (see Chapter 3) and expand the branches to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. Create a new DWORD (32-bit) value named NoCDBurning and double-click it to set its value data to 1.