Seeing all the blank DVD’s and CD’s in a store can confuse a computer user. And with most computers shipping with a DVD-ROM over the past four or so years, it is even more confusing. And to make matters even more difficult, many CD/DVD-ROM manufacturers have black fronts with black text! Yikes that’s hard to read.
One of my customer’s today assumed that his laptop had a DVD burner because it could play DVD’s. He is not alone as many people fall into the same category…it is not that clearly written. For many years, we used floppy disks and if a computer had a floppy drive, we knew we could read and write to a floppy. Unfortunately, that is not the case today. CD and DVD players come in two primary flavors (I won’t discuss all the hybrids here); ROM (Read Only Memory) and R/RW (Recordable / Re-writable).
ROM drives are strictly for installing programs or accessing data from a CD or DVD. They will play movies (DVD), music (CD’s and DVD’s) and allow us to copy information from data versions of these disks.
R/RW disks can do everything a ROM can plus record to blank media.
To determine what type of drive you have, either shine a flashlight on the front of your CD or DVD drive and look for the ROM or R/RW or Rewritable designations. If you are using Windows XP, double-click on the "My Computer" icon and it will distinguish which are ROM and which are writable drives. Lastly, you can download and run the great little Belarc Advisor tool that will also give you details about your CD/DVD drives and much more in the process.
