Walk Through Review

Installation – 8

Installation is easy and straight forward using the Install Wizard.  A couple of things to point out are making sure you select or not select certain additional tasks.  One red flag here is to make sure to uncheck making Rocket Division your home page.

A restart is required for full functionality.

Features – 7

StarBurn features the ability to burn CD, DVD, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD media. It also supports other optical storage media including CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, BD-R/RE, HD-DVD-R/RW and DVD-RAM.  There is also a nice Quick Start Wizard that allows simplification of frequently used options.

There are a lot of other cool features available in StarBurn which allow easy management of physical media.

If you want to save space on certain discs there is a handy media compression tool that will convert audio to various formats.

Ease of Use – 7

Using StarBurn is intuitive and features a nicely laid out interface.

As a quick demonstration we will look at burning an image of Linux to disc.  Select Burn Image from the side menu or toolbar on top.

This will open up the Image Burner Wizard where you choose which drive to burn the the data.

Next, choose the location of the file or in this case ISO to burn.

The next step is to select Optimum Power Calibration where the drive will test a write and read to determine the best laser power for recording.  This helps the burner adjust to different manufacturers discs which always vary slightly.  Also, here is where to choose the burning speed, for ISO and important data images I usually choose the slowest for best results.

There will be a progress indicator and information from the log file being created.  Here you can check for any errors that might occur.  When the disk is finished it will pop out and your done.  You can then save the log file if needed.

Performance – 7

StarBurn is very comparable in speed and performance to other disc burning utilities.  We ran through burning data, music, images, and DVD discs and they turned out perfect every time.  It works great with Windows XP and Vista 32 or 64bit editions.  At this time I have not been able to get it to work with Windows 7 and I have read others are experiencing compatibility issues as well.

Product Support – 7

Support is typical of most software products these days.  On their website there is a FAQ Page, User Forum, and email support.

Conclusion

Overall I was very impressed with the easy functionality of StarBurn.  It is quick, easy to use, and fairly light on system resources.  Though not as many editing options as a product like Nero, there are plenty of tools and features to allow custom disc burning.

Rating

• Installation: 8
• Ease of Use: 7
• Features: 7
• Performance: 7
• Product Support: 7