What exactly is packetwriting software, and what are the poistives and negatives? Thanks. Fred

Packet Writting software like In CD (http://www.nero.com) and Direct CD (http://www.roxio.com) enable you to format a CDR or CDRW so that it can be used like a removable harddrive.
Formatted disks can be written to by dragging & dropping files in Windows Explorer. Files can be deleted , although with a CDR disc all that does is hides the file, with CDRWs the space is recovered.


Advantages, can copy files to the disc adhock, useful for incremental data backups or small file transfer.

Disadvantages
Requires a UDF reader to access the files so you can't just go to another PC unprepared, if the reader PC doesn't have UDF loaded it can't read the disc.
Formatting takes up space (about 12 Meg if my memory serves me).
Can't be used for backing up games and applications, can't be used to record audio CDs. DVD / CD players can't read them so it's no good for storing MP3s on. Can be unreliable, corruption of the disc during a write session is a possibility - resulting in a disc that is either very difficult or impossible to recover data from.

IMHO more trouble than it's worth.

Thanks much Darkman. Very informative. FredE