Burning CDs from the Desktop
In the old days (two years ago), every PC came with a CD-ROM drive. Nowadays, most new PCs come with a CD burner, a drive that can record new CDs that contain your own stuff.
If your PC has such a drive—either a CD-R drive (CD recordable, which means you can record each disc only once) or a CD-RW drive (CD rewriteable, for which you can buy CD-RW discs that you can erase and re-record as many times as you like), you’re in for a treat. For the first time, Windows XP lets you burn your own CDs full of files and folders without having to buy a program like Roxio’s Easy CD Creator.
That’s because Windows XP includes Easy CD Creator (pieces of it, anyway). You now have a great feature for making backups, emailing people, or exchanging files with a Macintosh (the resulting CDs are cross-platform).
If your PC does, in fact, have a CD burner, start by inserting a blank CD. Windows offers to open a special CD-burning window, which will be the temporary waiting room for files that you want to copy to the CD ( Figure 3-11, top left).
Note
If you’ve turned off this feature, you can open the CD window yourself: Open My Computer, and then double-click the CD icon.
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