How to Successfully Burn CDs

Burning CDs is a great way to preserve important documents, pictures, and other valuable data. As technology advances, many new computers come with hardware that allows the user to burn CDs. It is very easy to burn CDs--just follow these steps to ensure that your CDs are burned successfully.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. First, you need to choose what type of CD you are going to burn. There are two kinds: CD-R and CD-RW. CD-R means that you can only burn the CD once. CD-RW means that you can record and erase these CDs up to 1,000 times. Depending on the data you wish to record, choose the type of CD to burn.

2. Create room on your computer's hard drive to hold the data you are going to burn. Most of the time, you will have to save the data onto your hard drive before you burn the CD, so you must have enough memory to support it.

3. Shut down all programs other than the CD burning software. It takes a lot of processing to burn CDs, so free up some memory by closing out of any unnecessary applications.

4. If you get error messages when trying to burn CDs, try lowering the recording speed. It may take your computer longer to burn CDs, but you will still get the same results.

5. After CD burning is complete, always label your CD. Include content details and dates to keep your burned CDs organized.