When copying CDs I use the inbuilt Windows XP CD writing software. When I drag the files to the CD-RW drive, they are stored as temporary files. Then, a balloon appears above the system tray saying ‘You have files waiting to be written to the CD. To see the files now, click on this balloon’. I then have to either click on the balloon or go to ‘My Computer’ and write the files to CD using the CD Writing Wizard. How can I eliminate the extra step (of saving the files as temporary files) and write the files to CD in one step?

I have not been able to find a way to disable the temporary holding area for files to be written to CD, and make the files write directly to the CD (as is the case when copying files to a floppy disk, for example). Even if there were a way, this is not a good idea. Depending on the speed of your CD-R(W) drive, it will take around 30 seconds to 1 minute to write one small file to the CD. Even if the file is very small (e.g., 100 KB) it will still take this amount of time, as after every file (or batch of files) which are written to CD, the CD writing wizard must write a set of data to make the CD readable on CD-ROM drives. This is the main problem if you write files to CD one by one. This data has to be written after each file and would take substantially longer to write all the files you intend to copy to the CD, especially if you are copying many files. So, the inconvenience of that extra step to tell Windows that you want to write the batch of files to CD is actually the quickest way to go.