Vista Tutorial - dvd burns straight to hard drive not asking for blank dvd

Hi,

I am a novice with Vista. Have just bought a new lap top and tried to burn a DVD but instead of shrinking it then asking for a blank dvd to burn to it just saves to the hard drive.
I have dvd shrink which works fine but it doesnt seem to connect with the burner. I have downloaded a trial version of Nero 9 in case this helped but still burns to hard drive!!
Can anyone help?
PS- I noticed Vista will not accept the old Nero or Roxio!!

at the top of the nero screen there should be a drop down menu, i'm guessing image recorder is selected. Change that to your DVD writer and let me know if it works. If your writer isn't in the drop down then nero doesn't know how to use that drive.

Yeah I am Nero freak user and burner too, even to the point of burning DVD - DL's but when I installed nero I got the incompatable message but still installed it and it still failed to work. I LOVE NERO and would hate to have to try and learn some other software.

Please let me know how Nero 9 beta works for ya, ok?

On a side note it that doesn't work what do the experts here recomend using to burn DVDs. The MS application only burns Movies and pictures...and it doesn't as far as I can tell even let me select folders, just video files and picture files. That to me seemed rather short sighted by MS not to think people would want to burn data files or folders containing various files....

AFAIK. Vista allows you to use the explorer's built-in CD burning feature to burn data DVD-R's (XP could only do data CD-R's).

Once I made the recovery set I got rid of the OEM burner stuff. I use Imgburn. I bought Nero 6 because back then there wasn't much in the way of freeware for doing conversions(and I didn't know that much about it so I wanted software to take care of the job) but now there's lots of very good quality freeware to convert most anything to DVD. Once you have the DVD image or VIDEO_TS folder authored, just use Imgburn to burn it. btw CDBurnerXP works fine in 32 bit Vista... also freeware. Even converts .flac files. Just drop them on an Audio CD template and it converts 'em.

per our pm...nero only shows the image recorder in the drop down menu...does windows show the dvd writer as a drive?

also, try upgrading nero if it has any updates