All that you really need just to put a few files on a CD-R or CD-R/W is built into WinXP. There are some sort of wizardish methods (built in) to make it look like all you need to do is drage-and-drop the files to your CD - after doing some necessary setup, but in fact all the files to be added and all the files already on the disk must be copied to a space on your hard drive, after which they are "formatted" on your hard drive, and then burned in sequence to the CD. This happens even if you use the "methods" that make it look like you're just "copying to the CD-R/W."

Things already on the CD sometimes don't actually have to be burned again, but have to be "on the hard drive" with the stuff to be added so that they're part of the new file index that gets burned each time something is added. The index is written on the hard drive and then just gets copied to the CD. You can get the appearance of deleting something from a CD (CD-R or CD-R/W) by burning a new index, but the old file and the old index are still on the CD - just inacessible, and the space they occupied is "used up" on the CD.

The only way to actually recover "used up" space on a CD-R/W is to "reformat" the entire CD; which means of course that any data you want to save has to be copied to your hard drive, and after the CD-R/W is "re-melted," copied back to the CD. The "reformat" of a CD-R/W is seldom perfect enough to make it "like new," so there is some degradation in quality with each reformat; although I'm told that they'll commonly stand up to about a dozen(?) reformats before data loss is common. They will eventually "wear out."

CD-R backup of stuff you want to keep off the machine is reasonably reliable, if good quality disks are used and if they're properly stored. For an in-and-out memo pad, CD-R/W may be of some use to a few people, but most of those of my acquaintance who've tried it (and been enthused at first) have found CD-R more useful, with or without a supplemental "drive," which can be an external hard drive or more recently a "thumb drive" (USB) of one sort or another.

John