Tip #35: Burn disc images without third-party apps in Windows 7

NO - again, disc images are not photos of CDs.

(Photo credit Alison Ng)

Have you seen files ending with .iso, .img or .nrg before? Those are called disc images (no, not photos or pictures of CDs). A disc image is a snapshot of the contents of a CD or DVD, be it a data CD, audio CD or video DVD. You can think of disc images as zip files, which contain files copied from a CD or DVD. Disc images are convenient because they let you store whole CDs and DVDs on your hard drive for easy retrieval. You can also burn an image file onto a CD or DVD, in other words, make copies of a disc. Often, disc images are used to distribute operating systems such as Linux and the release candidate version of Windows 7 (during the testing period before launch).

If you've used disc images before, then you may know that in prior versions of Windows, you need to use a third party burning application like Nero or Roxio to burn the image onto a disc. New to Windows 7 is native support for .iso and .img images. In other words, you can now burn image files of these formats, without having Nero or Roxio installed.

To burn a disc image in Windows 7:

1. Double-click on the image file. (must be .iso or .img, Windows does not support other types like .nrg and .bin).
2. Windows Disc Image Burner pops out. If it doesn't, right click on the image file, choose Open With > Windows Disc Image Burner.
3. Insert a blank CD or DVD.
4. If you like, tick Verify disc after burning. This checks the disc after burning to see if it was burned without errors.
5. Click Burn.
6. Wait for it to finish.
7. Done.

If you haven't come across disc images before and you'd like to just give it a go, you can download Ubuntu, which comes as an .iso image file (about 700MB, fits on a CD). After you've burned it, you can play around with it, just to also try a Linux operating system. If you're not using Windows 7, and you don't have a disc burning application, InfraRecorder is a free and open source burning application which you can download.