A New Skill For the Day

It's good when we really do learn something new every day.

My new skill today was copying CDs on my computer. For someone who is reasonably competent with computers, it seems odd that I've never done this before. My old computer didn't have a burner on it. My current one came with two CD burner- DVD readers installed. In the past whenever I wanted a CD made, I would just take it to one of the many other computer users in our household and get them to do it.

Our friend Merv from South Australia had asked me to send him a couple of CDs with talks by John Alley and David Hood so I thought here was my chance to have a go.

Under Windows to do this you have to use a specialised program- usually "Nero". I don't know if Vista has actually improved this at all. That seems really strange to me because CD burners have been around for a while and you would have thought by now they would be considered just another common device.

Luckily I don't use Windows. Under linux it you can do it straight from the file manager. I did have to read the help page but it was straight forward. Go to the "Computer" icon, right click on the CD icon and select "Copy Disk". One more click to confirm and then just wait. Very simple. Very nice.

I think I could do that easily enough next time!