Starting in the obvious place, the interface is quite similar to Nero’s, except that the layout is split vertically between the file browser and disc builder. Even if you’ve never used Nero or a similar program before the layout should be easy to figure out and work with. One thing that might be confusing initially is that all the menus and whatnot refer to “Compact Disc” or “CD” even when you’re working with DVDs. Just make sure you’ve started a DVD project (from the File menu) and everything will work fine. This has actually caught me out a few times as the program defaults to starting a data CD project on startup and there’s no obvious difference between that and a data DVD.

Burning works fine and is comparable to ImgBurn in terms of time taken. When I burned my first disc IR reported that it was burning at 4.0x which is a lot less than the burner and disc were capable of (16x). Burning the same image with ImgBurn resulted in faster burn rates being reported but it didn’t actually take less time to burn. A few other annoyances rear their heads at the burning stage though. First of all, if you have two drives of the same make and model then it’s impossible to tell which is which as IR gives you no indication of whether or not there are discs in either drive. Secondly, if you do select the wrong drive (as I frequently do) or there’s a problem with the disc then the program goes through the entire process of creating a disc image to burn to disc but then fails and wipes the image, requiring it to be built all over again when you fix the problem. Thirdly, the progress information leaves a lot to be desired – I’d like to know who came up with the idea of having “estimated time of finish” be the only indicator. At first I thought this was “estimated time remaining” or something but, no, it’s the actual time that the task is expected to finish. Really, is that useful to anyone? Is is that difficult to subtract the current time to get the length of time estimated? I’d really prefer to have both, along with the time already taken on the task.

Attempting to burn an audio CD exposed a few more problems. The first time I tried to burn a CD I ran into my old friend the “can’t tell which drive is which” issue – IR started converting the tracks without issue but then it sat there doing nothing for a few minutes before finally telling me that there was a problem with the disc and it had to be reloaded (the drive was ejected and pulled back before I could do anything) and then it sat there for a few more minutes before I cancelled the operation. Now at this point I discovered yet another dumb usability problem: if I click cancel why on Earth would it report that “the operation was cancelled” and then wait for me to click OK before going back? Yes, to cancel something you click Cancel then OK. Trying to burn the disc again with the other drive (I assume it was the other drive) gave me the other problem: IR was apparently trying to access the temporary files it created beforehand (WAVs from the OGG files I added) and every file came up as “permission denied”. Very, very strange. I think it had something to do with IR using Cygwin in the background.

I did finally managed to get the audio CD burned and it appears to have worked perfectly. I would have liked some more information and options for my audio CD though. I couldn’t find anywhere to not burn the extra 2 seconds between tracks for instance. There’s also no support for CD-Text but this isn’t a big deal. MP3 support is not provided in the base package but there’s a LAME plugin available to add it in of you desire.

Overall, I’d say InfraRecorder works well enough for creating CDs and DVDs but, perhaps there are lots of small usability problems that I think need to be addressed before it can really be considered a nice piece of software to use and one that’s capable of being a true replacement for Nero.

Setting drive letters in Windows

Windows sucks at drive selection. When I first installed Windows I had two drives in there that had already been formatted. These came up as C: and D: and the newly formatted drive, after taking into account two DVD drives and my card reader (that comes up as four separate disk drives), my Windows partition was listed as K:. The C: drive, for some bizarre reason was a “system drive” even though I hadn’t installed anything on it.

I understand the Windows drive system is a legacy but it’s really just downright crazy. Why can’t I use A: and B: as drive letters? Why does a card reader come up as a set of drives even though there are no disks in it? Why is the drive letter so damn important? I much prefer the Unix way of mounting partitions as directories in the filesystem hierarchy – it’s far more logical and has responded better to changes in the way we use computers.

Antec Sonata III

This is one very, very fine case. Currently it’s on the floor next to my desk and I can barely hear it. Quite impressive considering there’s a quad-core CPU, a massive graphics card and four hard drives in there!

I highly recommend this case for your next PC.

Getting Windows working

I’d forgotten how much stuff you need to install to make a Windows system actually workable. Multimedia codecs, an office suite, a PDF reader, an archive program (eg. WinZip), CD/DVD burning software, iTunes for managing my iPod, a desktop search application, decent web browser and email programs, a proper text editor, a calendar and so on and so forth.

Being Windows you also need anti-virus, anti-spyware, a firewall and other anti-malware programs. Even though these degrade the functionality of your computer rather than enhance it.

Almost all of these things come included with the base operating system (or are not needed at all) on Linux or Mac OS X. Most PC vendors have to make up for this problem but end up bundling in all sorts of crap so personally I’m happier if Microsoft choose to include fewer programs rather than give me more crap I don’t want. Such as Internet Explorer.

Cables everywhere!

Even with the Sonata’s nice internal layout you still wind up with cables running all over the place. I wish all PSUs could be like Antec’s NeoPower? Detachable cables are the way to go.

I’m just glad I went with the SATA DVD burners. Nice thin cables are so much nicer than the huge IDE cables.

The more things change…

Even with all the crazy fast hardware in the computer, for day-to-day operations I don’t notice anything different from my old computer. Boot up and program start up is slightly faster but that will probably change over time. I can watch 1080p videos now but I don’t have many of them anyway.

Video encoding and playing games are really the only two areas I’ve noticed the massive increase in hardware power.

I must admit I was unprepared for just how huge the graphics card actually was – the card is longer than the motherboard! Not to mention the huge heatsink and fan on top of it. Thankfully the card fit in without any problems; there’s a tight fit in the case now but nothing too drastic, although I would advise people install the graphics card last if you’re going to get one of these.

I am so far unimpressed by the card reader. I haven’t actually used it functionally yet but from my play around inserting my camera’s SD card, it doesn’t seem to be as nice as, say, the card reader on my laptop. The card doesn’t actually slide all the way in and so sticks out, which is a bit of a pain as my case door must stay open.

The main problem I’m having right now is that I’d forgotten just how mind-numbingly awful the Windows XP installation is. I can’t believe I have to sit here and babysit the damn thing for the sole reason that it asks questions every 10 minutes. Why oh why did no-one on the installer team realise that all that information could have been gathered at the very start and then the process could run uninterrupted.

Don’t even get me started on the “Installation will complete in 39 minutes” thing.

Sigh. Oh well, this will most likely be the last time I need to install Windows XP on a computer so I guess I should look at it with … something less than the sheer loathing it deserves. To cleanse myself I might get around to installing the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 7.04 later.