How to burn a CD in Windows XP

That said, let's see how to burn a CD with Windows XP.
1. Insert a blank CD in your computer's CD-ROM drive. In a few moments you will see a dialog box popping up on your monitor that looks like the screenshot below.


Figure 1
CD Drive (D:) dialog box.
What do you want Windows to do?Select (click on to highlight) "Open writable CD folder using Windows Explorer", then click on OK. (If you want Windows to perform the same action every time you insert a blank CD in the drive, then put a checkmark in front of "Always do the selected action" before clicking on OK.)
The above action will bring up a temporary folder where you can drag and drop the files you want copied on the CD. You can bring here as many files from your computer as you want so long the total file sizes do not exceed the CD's capacity. An average CD can hold upto about 700 MB. If you exceed this limit, Windows will notify you. In that case, delete some files from this folder to stay within the limit. After you bring your files to this folder, the folder will look similar to the one shown below.





Figure 2
Drag and drop on this folder the files you want copied on the CD.You are almost done. Now click on "Write these files to CD" the left panel of the folder. (Please see Figure 2.) That will bring out the CD Writing Wizard as shown below.


Figure 3
CD Writing Wizard dialog box.
Just type a name for your CD here.In the above dialog box, just type a name for your CD. By default, Windows inserts the date on the CD name box. You can put anything you want. If you want, put a checkmark in front of "Close the wizard after the files have been written" option. If you don't put a checkmark there as shown, after your files have been written on the CD, the wizard will ask you if you want the files to be copied to another CD. This is a great convenience when you want to create multiple copies of your CD. You don't have to start from scratch again. So do whatever suits you better, and then click on Next.
At this point, CD Writing Wizard starts writing the files on your blank CD and displays a progress bar as shown below.


Figure 4
CD burning progress bar.
Shows estimated time left.Please note how fast the files can be copied to the CD depends on the speed of the blank CD. Some CD's are faster than the others and they cost more. The speed is always written on the blank CD.
One last note. If you have burned a CD and later realize that a lot of empty space has been left out on the CD, you can add files to that CD to fill it up. Just remember, files having the same name will be overwritten and if some of these files have changed, the latest version of the file will be written to the CD.