Technical information

Chapter 3: Storage: Internal, External, and in the Sky

can’t burn discs, remove any discs from inside the

drive; then open File Explorer from the Start screen

and look at the icon for your CD or DVD drive.

Because computers always speak in secret code,

here’s what you can do with the disc drives in

your computer:

✓ DVD-RW: Read and write to CDs and DVDs.

✓ BD-ROM: Read and write to CDs and DVDs, plus

read Blu-ray discs.

✓ BD-RE: These can read and write to CDs, DVDs,

and Blu-ray discs.

If your PC has two CD or DVD burners, tell

Windows 8 which drive you want to handle your

disc-burning chores: Right-click the drive,

choose Properties, and click the Recording tab.

Then choose your favorite drive in the top box.

Buying the right kind of blank CDs

and DVDs for burning

Stores sell two types of CDs: CD-R (short for

CD-Recordable) and CD-RW (short for

CD-ReWritable). Here’s the difference:

✓ CD-R: Most people buy CD-R discs because

they’re very cheap and they work fine for

storing music or files. You can write to them

until they fill up; then you can’t write to

them anymore.

✓ CD-RW: Techies sometimes buy CD-RW discs

for making temporary backups of data. You can

write information to them, just like CD-Rs. But

when a CD-RW disc fills up, you can erase it and

start over with a clean slate.

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