For years, burning CDs required separate software, so a lot of people don’t realize that Windows XP now comes with this feature built in. If you have a CD writer (CD-RW drive) in your computer and the computer is running Windows XP, you can burn CDs almost as easily as copying a file anywhere else.
The first step is to figure out what files you want to copy. In Windows Explorer or My Computer, you can examine your files and folder structure. As an aside, I’ve written endlessly about organizing your files, so if you’ve chucked them all into one folder, you’ll discover that locating your files can be a tedious task. Organizing your files into a logical folder structure is probably the number one thing you can do to improve your productivity.
In any case, assuming you have a clue where your files are located on your hard disk, insert a blank writable CD into your CD-RW drive. After the drawer closes, Windows XP displays a dialog box that asks if you want to open a writable CD folder. If you click OK, Windows opens Windows Explorer with the cursor at the CD drive folder.
You can drag and drop or copy and paste files to your CD drive folder from any location on your hard disk. Windows essentially adds them to a list first without burning them, so you can change your mind about the files you’re adding (just right-click a file and select Delete to remove a file from the list). When you are done adding files to the list, at the top left of the screen, click Write these Files to CD to run the Windows CD burning wizard.
Another quick way to burn files is to use the right-click menu. From within Windows Explorer, right-click the file you want to copy to CD and choose Send to|CD-RW. If you hold down the Ctrl key while you click, you can select multiple files, then right-click to run Send to. This command adds your file to the list of files to be burned.
Again, when you use Send to, it only puts the files into a list, it doesn’t start burning the CD. To start the burn process, right-click the CD-RW icon in Windows Explorer and choose Write these Files to CD.