Home > Consumer Reviews > Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 Platinum Edition [OLD VERSION]

I got Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 bundled with a DVD+/-RW drive. Needless to say, I was eager to get burning. I've used Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 for 1.5 years and have been very happy. But, that's neither here nor there. I'll cut to the chase.

After installing, I found that all of my hard drives and partitions had been assigned new drive letters, seemingly at random. Furthermore, in Disk Management, most partitions didn't show a letter and those that did show a letter, appeared twice in Windows Explorer. Windows was notifying me that \System Volume Information\tracking.log was corrupt and that I needed to run chkdsk. To make matters worse, Windows no longer identified my system boot drive with the "(System)" designation, meaning I could delete the partition if I wanted!

Uninstalling did not resolve this, so I backed up all my data to an external disk. I then performed a fresh install of Windows XP. I then installed Service Pack 1 and all critical updates. I also installed DirectX 9.0b and Windows Media Player 9. After that, I installed Office XP, followed by Easy CD & DVD Creator 6.

I rebooted, and found the exact same problem. Clearly there is some serious problem with this software. I'm going back to version 5.

For kicks, since I knew I'd need to reinstall XP again, I tried to delete the system partition. It let me.

A bug this serious should've been caught before beta testing.

I lost my entire Windows XP installation because upon reboot after installing this I could not get past the 'Welcome' screen.

I followed all the instructions posted at the Roxio website, and none of them fixed the problem.

Luckly, I was able to remove the laptop hard drive and mount it in another PC running XP and get the data off it, but I never did get it to boot until I reinstalled. (The Windows XP 'R'epair process couldn't even reboot the machine at the proper point and continue...)

My suggestion is to find another product, NOT one by Roxio. EZ-CD Creator 4 was an excellent product... 5 and 6 have been nothing but problems from almost everyone I have heard install them. (System instabilities, etc)

You have been warned.

Oh yes introducing the new & inproved Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 !!!

I believe almost every cd-r burning newbie started with Adaptec Easy Cd Creator ...which was good. Then Adaptec relinquished that department to another of it's branch called Roxio ...which was good also.

Roxio had great ideas and vision for Easy CD Creator. It changed the core engine and bulked up the software program to include alot of extras to enchance audio burning (mp3s, wma, etc.) , photo cds, video creation, and label creation ....Roxio made it hip to burn!

Things were going good, Roxio partnered with alot of CD-RW drive manufacturers, offering the basic version of Roxio Easy CD Creator. Hence most new owners of cd-rw burners used it and liked it.

Off in the distance, A STORM WAS BREWING, Microsoft was going to introduce something BIG .....Windows XP!!!

While other software companies were worried about compatibility with WinXP, Roxio was not. It has already teamed up with Microsoft to include it's burning software engine in Microsoft's Windows Media Player and felt quite confident in Easy CD Creator's compatibility with the new operating system.

Roxio relaxed during the period when WinXP was shipping to stores ...which was Bad!

Almost every user with Roxio Easy CD Creator (basic & platinum) upgrading to WinXP began reporting problems. We're not talking about minor problems here! Huge drastic problems were happening all over the world. Hard drive crashes, blue screen of deaths, cd-rw drives not being recognized, crucial back-up data lost, it was coaster hell...it was like Ford's Pinto,

Roxio was in disbelieve, stunned senseless. How could it small support team handle millions of angry users? It couldn't and it couldn't refund all it's products. Eventuallly it just ignored everybody. Worst yet it's software engine was heavily entrenched in the old operating system, uninstalling Easy Cd Creator was useless.

Enter Nero...

What was bad for Roxio became good for Ahead's Nero Burning Rom. Nero was not as pretty but it was small, simple and fast, it got the job done! Mass migration to Nero became the norm and things were good once again.

Finally after a long time Roxio fixed it's Easy CD Creator to be compatible with WinXP and incorporated alot of features from Nero, but too late the word was out: Roxio equals Trouble. Use Nero instead!

This mantra is still being repeated at this very moment.

I've been testing Roxio Easy CD & DVD Creator 6 for a day now, throwing everything at it to make it crash (burning vcds & svcds, everything at different speeds). Nope ...no crashes and get this ...I think it's faster than Nero in CD to CD copy, about half a minute.

Roxio has spent alot of R&D with this version and it shows. I praised them for getting rid of that troublesome DirectCD. It replaced it with something called "Drag to Disc" which is more universally accepted. It's even compatible with Nero's InCD formatted discs. (It replaces the functionality of Nero's InCD, so it's safe to uninstall InCD).

Now please keep in mind I have a pretty good system, P4, WinXP with plenty of RAM.

PROS:
-This baby is pretty! Great for Newbies
-You can burn everything under the sun
-Now it officially supports DVD and SVCD
-Includes a 390 page manual and Flash tutorials
-Huge improvements to it's DVD & Photo menu creator
-Can burn large data, spanning across multiple discs
-It's alot faster than any previous versions
-Supports Plextor's Power Rec feature

CONS:
-It's huge in terms of file size, over 400 MB
-It's expensive, (buy it on special)

This release is excellent in terms of features but the programme swallows system resources. I run a P4 2.4Ghz with 768Mb of RDRAM and 7,200 rpm disks but this release still noticeably decreased the performance of my PC due to the high number of tasks it laods. My system shutdown time increased from 10 seconds to 4 minutes (reported to Roxio). Stick with Version 5 until Roxio works out some of the issues.

Just to add my own experience to those of other recent reviews... I installed v.6 on Win XP home edition and upon reboot, the system was completely unuseable!

I am a programmer by profession and a hardware enthusiasist with experience building systems from the ground up. It took me three days to recover the system.

...just my 2 cents worth, but I thought you should be aware.