How do I burn a Cd or Dvd in Vista

Vista comes with a pretty decent burning program to burn a cd or dvd. There are two ways to burn a cd or dvd in Windows Vista the first one is called ‘Live File System’ and the second one is called ‘Mastered’. When you burn a cd/dvd using the live file system it acts like a hard drive or a usb stick, you can add more files onto the disc at a later date, that’s pretty cool. The downside to using this method is dvd players can’t read these files, and only machines running Windows XP or later can read the discs. On the upside, if you use rewritable discs you can erase files on the disc.

Another way to burn a cd/dvd in Vista is called the ‘Mastered’ format. You can only burn files once burning a cd/dvd using this method. The good part about this is most modern cd/dvd players can read these files.

Ok, I’m glad that’s out of the way. So how do you burn a cd or dvd? I’m glad you asked. I will assume you have a writable cd/dvd drive for this tutorial. This one is the ‘Live file system’ which is the default in Windows.

Put CD or Dvd into the drive. A window should pop up like the picture below, click on the Burn Files to Disc to proceed.

Now enter a disc title if you wish I usually leave it as is.

Windows will now format the disc.

Now on the right panel find the file or files you want to burn on the cd or dvd and click, hold and drag to the left panel

After you drop your files Windows Vista will burn the files onto the disc.

Now you have burned the files onto the cd or dvd. You can add more files to the disc because we used the default Vista Live File System to burn the dvd. When you insert the same disc you previously burned before you will get a Window that will look a little different than if it were just a blank disc, I would click on the Open files to View Folder option and do what we did before by clicking and dragging files to add to the disc, now you don’t have to worry about wasting cds or dvds because now you keep using the disc until they fill up. How cool is that.

To burn a cd/dvd using the ‘Mastered’ format is easy too.

1. Put Cd or Dvd in drive

2. Select Burn files to disc.

3. Now on click on the Show formatting options at the bottom left of the window.

4. Select Mastered

5. Now click and drag the files you would like to burn

6. When you are done click on the burn to disc button at the top.

7. A window comes up, give your disc a title name, pick a speed to burn the disc, and click Next.

Tip: This format uses space on the hard drive to store files you want to burn, a cd is typically around 700mb so it uses that 700 mb to store files. If you wish to delete any files before you burn the cd go to the disc folder, choose the file you want to delete and go up
to the toolbar and select Delete temporary files.

That’s it, pretty easy huh. Now you know how to burn date files to a cd or dvd using Vista.