OSNews

CD Burning

Another welcome feature of XP is embedded CD burning. They designed it to make the process easy and straightforward for anybody. You just have to right click on any one or multiple files and folders, choose "Send To", and then choose the CD recorder drive and a balloon comes up (this one is useful contrary to most of the others) that you click and then the window for the CD-RW drive opens and you see the files and folders you selected with medium opacity and an arrow, indicating that those are waiting to be written to CD.

You don’t have to select them all at once, you can browse your files and add more if you want. When you’re finished, you have to click on the "Write these files to CD" link under the CD Writing Tasks tab on the left. Then the CD writing wizard will come up prompting you for a CD label, which smartly is already entered as the current date, and not in the difficult way Easy CD Creator used to do, but in a legible simple way as you can see in the picture. Clicking the "Next" button usually begins the CD burning process, unless you’re burning a CD with pictures. In that case, an intermediate step appears asking you if you want to include a picture viewer so that pictures can be viewed as a slide show when the CD is inserted. This is especially useful for giving CDs with pictures to people with earlier versions of Windows, because that viewer is compatible with them, and when you insert it a slideshow begins automatically, with black background and a predetermined amount of time for each picture, although you can navigate them with the cursor keys. However, I had partial success with this feature, since many time I recorded CDs with pictures in it and this step didn't appear.

Windows XP has also an embedded picture viewer that allows to easily navigate the contents of any folder with pictures in it. They have to be a supported file format, like BMP, TIFF, JPEG, etc. When you double click on any picture file, the viewer will open and you can navigate them with the cursor keys or with the arrow buttons that the viewer has. It also includes buttons for rotating the picture, zooming in and out fitting the image to the window or show it at normal size, deleting it, printing it, copying it to another location, open it in the native application for editing, and a help button.

All around, XP has changes everywhere. There are many more to talk about that would make this article too extensive, but I’m sure anyone that has a system that supports it will be very gratified after installing it. One advice: don’t even think of running it with 128 MBs of RAM, go for a minimum of 256 and 512 if you can spend a few bucks. With the low price of memory these days, it’s not that painful to the wallet and it will be a total relief for your computing eXPerience.

About the Author:
Sebastian works as a freelance, teaching computing, fixing computers and OS mess-ups and do some graphic and web design. He lives in Argentina, but he would prefer to live in North America, Europe or Australia, but with the huge restrictions for immigrants it's almost impossible to do so. He've been studying digital video editing for sometime on his own and the next two years he will be taking classes at an institute. He's got a one year old Dell and a PowerMac G3, so he also experiments with most popular OSes, although he still runs MacOSX 10.4. BeOS 5 doesn't run on his Dell not even in safe mode or any combination of switches. He had it on an old Compaq and loved it, but unfortunately all the programs he uses are only on Windows and MacOS. Sebastian tried Linux, but it's too messy for his taste. Sebastian can be reached on sebalv@mac.com

1. "Intro"
2. "Cons"
3. "Pros"
4. "More Pros"
5. "More Pros and Conclusion"