But can it burn CDs?
I've been a big supporter of
Nero Burning tools
for some time now. Back in the day I had all kinds of problems with the
tools that came bundled with my CD and noticed on the forums that I was
far from alone in this.
One day, someone suggested I try Nero, and I was hooked - here was the
powerful yet simple tool that allowed me to do everything I needed
without taking over my computer. Here was the tool that didn't take up
lots of resources when it wasn't running. Here was the tool that didn't
crash my computer constantly or order me to restart it 15 times during
install.
So I purchased a copy. And because I liked it, my college purchased a
copy... well 500 copies. And because I liked it, I pushed it at a lot
of people in the Microsoft newsgroups. I know quite a few people who at
least tried the demo because a
MVP told them to.
And I saw that all was good. Nero versions came and went as we needed
to update for new features and new drive support and all was good. Not
only did we like the program at work, but it was a nice lightweight
install that didn't add much to our build time and was easy to convert
to a MSI for easy network deployment.
Then came version 6. All of a sudden lots of other tools got thrown
into the bundle. Some of them were good and some of them were not so
good. I personally quite liked the showtime utility for watching
movies, and while I wasn't keen on Nero Express and other tools, I can
at least understand that others might use those parts.
However, all these extras and the changes to the main program made it
unsuitable for us to continue to use at the College, so I identified a
new (Freeware actually) program for use there, and again life was good.
Until today, when I upgraded to Nero 7. A 100Mb download just to burn a
few DVDs and CDs. Yes really. And then I ran the installer, which
needed to reboot twice before it actually figured I could use my system
again.
This wouldn't be so bad except that I was actually trying to do other
things besides install software at the time, that it left parts of the
old installation behind despite saying it would remove it and to add
insult to injury, allowed me to pick an install option that made it
impossible to follow their registration instructions, forcing me to
reboot once more(!) just to install an upgrade.
But it doesn't end there. I finally get around to opening the start
menu entry for it and what do I find? Or rather, what don't I find?
Well I don't find Nero Burning ROM! That's right, Nero has become so
full of bloat that the options for actually burning a disk have been
relegated to a tertiary level menu. But at least I can easily run "Nero
Home", apparently a pale imitation of
Media Centre or possibly
Front Row. And you thought the paperclip was a waste of space!
Now if only I wasn't already running Windows Media Centre on this
system, that might actually be helpful. I suppose it gives me something
to do while I try to figure out how to make a CD.