Why does Vista want to "format" a CD-RW?

[GRAND_POOBAH]

I know this is an XP Newsgroup, but I have a question concerning upgrade
to Vista. I helped my friend set up his Vista system (Home Premium)and
he wanted to do some writing on the CD-RW drive. We put a CD-RW into
the drive, but the first thing Vista wanted to do was "format" the disk.

Windows XP never did that with my CD-RWs. Is this a Vista thing? The
formatting took almost 30 minutes before it would even open up a window
to the disk so we could drag & drop stuff to it for writing. Since the
disks were in a 10-pack I took one home to check on my XP Pro system.
Sure enough, when I put the disk in, a writable window opened and I
could drag & drop files to it without "formatting?

I am pretty sure that XP doesn't actually put the dropped files onto the
physical disk until you click "Write these files to the disk". So, is
this "formatting" Vista does actually the same thing that XP does under
the guise of "preparing the disk for use" at the end of the writing
session? If it is, then why does it take so long under Vista?

Can anyone shed further light on this?

GP

 

[frodo]

my guess is it's not Vista; you have a "packet writting" CD driver
installed and running, such as Nero's "InCD" or Roxio's "DirectCD". That
is what is putting up the Format dialog when you insert the CDRW (it'll do
it for CDR too).

You need to turn those off (stop them from starting up at system startup
time). Check the system tray for an icon, or check task manager to see if
either of these puppies is running...

Almost no one uses these packet writters anymore, they were a novelty when
they first arrived on the scene and never really caught on. Most
installers don't install them by default anymore either.

 

[GRAND_POOBAH]

Ah ha! I hadn't thought of that. I'll have him check and see if one of
those is running. I agree that they are unnecessary nowadays. Thanks.

GP

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