As this thread is going into its second year, I've had time to gain a little more experience with our setup; and we have added something new. Perhaps additional comment will be helpful.

Wife's setup is the Yamaha CRW-3200EZ mentioned above, added into her Win2K machine that already had a CD-ROM. The main software that came with the Yamaha was Nero - Burning ROM. CD to CD copies are a snap with this setup, and I stuffed our old Win98 "guest" PC into an old "stereo cabinet" with a turntable and tape deck for recording from LPs or tapes direct to the hard drive. The recordings are copied to the PC with the burner via our etherlink LAN for the actual burn.

We recently needed an upgraded laptop for business use, and got a Dell (Latitude C840) that came with a "built-in" burner and "Roxio Easy CD Creator" software.

The Yamaha/Nero setup is our system of choice for music CDs. It's easy and almost foolproof. For data CDs, Nero has one almost fatal flaw. Every file (in Windows) has a "long file name," which is the one you see in Win Explorer. Every file also has a "DOS filename" which is the one you see if you run a "dir" in DOS (Command window). Unfortunately, a data CD uses an ISO filename that is created (using some arcane conversion) during preparation for burning.

Not every "long file name" will convert directly to a "legal ISO" filename. When Nero encounters an illegal ISO filename, it reports the ISO name and stops. It can be literally impossible to determine what DOS or "long filename" corresponds to that ISO name, so you hunt through the directory for something that looks suspicious, change it, and try again. If you're lucky, and changed the right one, Nero then finds the next "ISO filename error" and aborts. Start over. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I was in my third month of trying to get a "clean" set of file names for the backup of our last year of email (1500 files, 700MB) using Nero, when we got the Dell with "Easy CD." When Easy CD finds a "non-conforming" ISO filename, it reports the Windows long file name and suggests a correction. You can accept or edit the correction, and it continues to the next non-conforming name. You can also just click "change all" - and the compilation completes in one shot.

Three months hard work with Nero had NOT produced a good data backup. Fifteen minutes with Easy CD and it was done.

Obviously, most people here are more interested in music CDs than in data backups. Nero is still our choice for music - but if I had only one burner, I'd definitely have both of these programs on the machine.

John