Roxio's DirectCD any good anymore?

[sak]

Hey i have used DirectCD like a long time ago. but have not used it since i stoped using EZCD which was a long time ago..prob like 1.5 years ago..when i totally went with Nero and CloneCD...anywhoo

When i used DirectCD it was a good program..kinda like Mt.Reiner but with this program we could with to cd-r's like floopy's...i always though this was a great thing.

Anywhoo my question is if i install DirectCD only. will it take up much memory. and does it always have to run in the background. i already have ton's of programs...although i do have 700 MB..but still ever little bit counts..

anywhoo could someone using the program give me MB figures so that i may know exactly how much memory it takes.

Thanks

 

[slowbutsure]

Why not just use IN CD which comes with Nero and does the same thing as Direct CD.

 

[StraightPipe]

I'm using Roxio's Easy CD Creator 5.0 (oem version). It isnt full featured (unless you pay for it all). IT is only taking 7.04 MB on my pc. the inteface is good and you can still use like a floppy. you can turn off the System Tray icon and win XP will auto pull it up when it detects a blank CD.

 

[sak]

Originally posted by: slowbutsure
Why not just use IN CD which comes with Nero and does the same thing as Direct CD.

The reason i dont use INCD is b/c it doesnt work like a floppy on cd-r drives it only does that with cd-rw... which i dont use...

Bump??

 

[sak]

Bump ^

 

[glugglug]

DirectCD is has a new feature that makes it even better than it was a few years ago -- 4.0 and up have transparent compression. The compression ratio is much better than NTFS, not quite as good as zip. Unlike on your HD where compression will likely cost performance from additional CPU overhead, on a slower device like a CDRW the compression actually speeds things up because a lesser amount of data needs to be written to the CD. It also has the nice feature that if you format with 4.0 or higher and take the disk to a machine without a UDF reader it sees the disk as having a 180Kish partition with the UDF driver installer.

That said, there are some serious flaws:

1. 5.0 is the minimum version usable if you have windows xp -- if you install 4.0 on xp your CD drive will become unusable until you delete these registry keys:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\LowerFilters
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\UpperFilters

2. Similar conflict to the above with some other packet writers

3. dies when appending more than 900MB or so to a single file on the CD (900MB before compression of course). Also, such a large file can only be created on the CD with unix cat or cp commands or similar tool -- if you try to copy a file that large in explorer, explorer sees there isn't enough room to fit it uncompressed and refuses to try (even though it would fit compressed).

4. 5.0 is incompatible with M$ SMS (not that anyone would use this on a home machine). Haven't tried 6.0.