What CD/DVD-authoring software do you use? Please, don’t say the built in Windows one. Nero? I bet. But why not? After all it is a name we all know for years and most computers come pre-bundled with Nero, and if you’re out of luck, as well with Photoshop Elements, Microsoft Works (if it still exists) and/or a trial version of McAffee’s or Norton’s Firewall and anti virus software.

I tell you why you better stay away from Nero. In case you haven’t noticed it yourself: Nero comes with a rat’s tail of additional software that you probably, no, most likely will never use. There’s Nero ShowTime for example – completely useless if you have any other player software. Just browse Nero StartSmart (incorrectly labeled SmartSmart at Nero’s website) and you’ll find many options and programs you will never need or use. Like as the DVD-movie feature that comes with many ugly and hence unusable presets for holiday-DVDs (=sunset and palm trees), weddings or children’s birthdays. It is really hard and takes quite a while to get a plain minimalist DVD menu. At least I know that I don’t use it.
Worst of all is Nero’s indexing process. This is a sturdy little piece of software that sits in your memory and constantly indexes and scans your hard drive for changed or new files so that Nero BackItUp and some other Nero tools will perform better when anything else on your PC performs much worse. So if all of a sudden your performance drops, the CPU-load increases and working becomes impossibly slow, than check your task manager for NMStoreIndexsvr.exe or so. Lastly Nero is heavy on your wallet which *may* be okay, if you are hardcore and use all of its features on a daily basis.

Alternatives

• Instead of the whole Nero suite I bought for about 25 € total the French burning-software ONES that’s small and fast, does its job without hassles and works in my experience overall more reliable.
• The main disadvantage of ONES is the fact that if you’d like to rip a disc to an image-file, only the ONES image-format is supported, which is okay unless you want to do anything else with it than burn it with ONES back on a blank disc. But there’s the magnificent freeware tool ImgBurn that rips to any format (including .nrg) and burns any image-file-format (even the strange ONES-images I think) and it cost you no dime at all.
• Instead of Nero ShowTime use the Media Player Classic which plays nearly anything and is just a small .exe file and open source — yay!.
• If you want to produce DVDs or BluRays with menus invest in Adobe’s Encore DVD which is getting less buggy with every version and there are much more options designwise than Nero would ever offer. If you really know what you are doing then get your greedy hands on DVDlab PRO which allows you to play with very low-level features such as executing custom commands, tracking and passing variables and much more. And with about 270 € (incl. VAT) it’s cheaper that Encore. There’s also a cheaper and simpler version for hobbyists, the DVDlab Studio.
• If you use NeroBackItUp to keep your files in sync you can switch to Microsoft’s SyncToy 2.0 which is free and version 1.x works even under Vista once you’ve acquired the missing .dll for it. If you synchronize *a lot* of files and SyncToy keeps crashing when it tries to display 13.527 files, then I recommend a SyncBack license from 2BrightSparks. I use the SE version and it offers so many features that you’ll instantly love it if you have the heart of an archiving librarian.