A "real" burner program, such as Roxio or Nero will total up the burn size when you add files to the list, and might be worth considering.

While these are good programs, they were designed to try and be fool proof but are prone to fail on some CD and DVD writers.

but not all systems/programs observe the "extra 24" when calculating sizes. Some programs may report 1,000 Bytes as a KB and 1,000,000 as a MB. A few have been reported as correctly counting 1,024 bytes per KB but 1,000 KB per MB, although I haven't personally confirmed this usage for anything I've got.

This is due to the program's inherent mathematical way to 'round' to the most significant figure as I said before.

Windows Explorer fails to provide a way to include files in a subfolder of the folder you look at. A subfolder is reported as "zero" size, and the contents of the subfolder aren't counted at all. If your "burn" includes any subfolders, attempting to "add them up" is generally not accurate."

When you are on the 'Files to be burned' window in file explorer [Ctrl + A] then right click on the selected area and choose properties... ok it's not entirely accurate but is still close enough to judge for CD writing. CD's are around 10p each which just leaves time as being the expensive commodity in the equation so storing 650MB is not an expensive ordeal but learning that the 699MB is too much and choosing files to take of can add loads to your time.

Houston