directCD or not

[maansingh169]

i formated my friends computer because he had shit load of virus, spyware, adware, corrupted harddrives..the whole works...i installed windows xp pro and all the programs he needed....now the problems it this.
It is a Dell that he has, and he says before i formated, actually before when it worked, he could just pop a cd-r in to and drive (he has a burner and a regular 52x drive)...note: he said anydrive...... and he could use the blank cd like a floppy disk. Now this sounds great, but he said it did it automatically. Now i am pondering, was it directCD or just a Dell software or what was it that caused this to happen. i know directCD and how it works, but i thought you can only use it with burners....my boss, he has an older dell(windows 98 - only CD-Rom drive), and my other friend has a newer dell (winxp home - only dvd burner) and they both claim that this is true, but none of them know if DirectCD is running in the background. know i was thinking that it could be the integrated burner that windows xp comes with, but the friend with windows 98 (se i think) claims he can do it aswell....

what is this? what can it be?

[snafu099]

1. You know more than they do.
2. If software alone could burn to a standard optical drive reader, I would like to buy stock in that company.
3. If when they say "any" drive were true, why would they have both a reader and a burner.

While not a betting person, this is a case that I would be willing to bet a hefty sum on

[Dr. DOS]

Could have been the Nero version as well.... I've never been happy with the drag to disk utilities. Too many times the disk 'goes bad' or encouters read errors. I've been storing data on Flash drives and when I get to 700 megs worth I burn 'em to a disk then.

[Heywould3]

XP does have the ability to burn to cdr if you have a burner loaded..put a blank disk in and drag file directly to the drive via windows explorer and wala it wil l say.. you have files waiting to be burnt.. no external software needed

if you use a DVD RW you can use it as a removeable drive sam for CD RW but jsut slower then hell

[Nelson37]

It is called "packet writing", XP supports this natively. Other OS can use DirectCD, though I have had MANY problems with this and similar software.

It is NOT POSSIBLE for an ordinary, read-only drive to write to disks in any way, shape, or form. This is a good example of how the average user is often confused about what they are doing.

[Capmaster]

Agree. Packet-writing has caused uncounted errors and bugs in OS-es and apps. I would think long and hard about its benefits before installing