coderchris.com

When I converted my laptop to a dual boot system, I did so by shrinking the Vista system partition (C:\) to half it's size to allow me to setup Linux in the free space.

That's fine I thought, as I only use one or two programs on Vista anyway so there'd be no big problems with available space for app's (data is stored elsewhere), but recently Vista's been throwing low disk space warnings at me...

This was a bit weird, so I decided to have a look around and work out what was causing this.

Well, it turns out that a couple of weeks back I needed to burn a CD and as a result I turned to an old favourite, Nero, for this. I had gone to the website and just downloaded the 30 day trial without thinking too much about it, installed it and burnt my disk as a one off - job done and Nero was forgotten about.

It turns out however that the Version of Nero I downloaded, once installed, consumed a massive 1.67Gb on disk! I think this makes it the biggest single program (set) I have ever installed, even bigger than a full Microsoft Office install!!

That's just nuts and when you compare it to Ashampoo's Burning suite at 26.4 Mb then I think it's very fair to say that Nero has become very excessive bloatware over the last few years.

I actually use Ashampoo's burning software a lot more than Nero nowadays and it seems to do a good a comparable job with a very easy wizard driven process which is very familiar to existing Nero users. 

So the upshot is that if you want some decent burning software, and don't want the massive disk overhead of Nero use Ashampoo!

Or if like me you use a Toshiba Laptop, have a dig around in the Toshiba programs folder in the start menu, and you may just find Toshiba disc creator in there, which is a free (9.7 Mb) burning utility that comes bundled with the machine - Doh!

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