BURN TO CD: A simple alternative

I bought Xatwhow to use mainly on web pages, so I never tried to
burn to CD until I read how much trouble others were having. For
web pages I usually limit a web show to 10 images, otherwise it
takes a miserably long time for the page to open for users with
dialup connections.

I run Win XP (home), 2.8 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, and use a generic OEM
CD burner. For this test, I chose 520 JPG image files, total
29,772,643 bytes. The average file size per image is 57kb.
Naturally, if you use TIFF or BMP images, the file sizes may be much
larger and cause you problems, being slow to load and transition to
the next image.

First, I put all the images into a single folder and created a Slide
Show for PC. It took 4 min 28 sec to create the slide show, using
all 520 images and one MP3 sound track. The slide show was saved to
my "Slideshows" folder.

Next, I opened the slideshow folder to preview it and, satisfied it
was what I wanted, I created an autorun.inf file to cause it to
autorun. To create an .inf file, open word pad and type the
following exactly:

[autorun]
OPEN=filename.exe

That's all. Filename is the name of your slide show. Keep it short
and simple. Save this text file as autorun.inf. If you don't
require the autorun feature, skip that step and open your CD drive
manually to run the .EXE file.

I feel Win XP has perfect burning software built into the program
(licensed from Roxio) and don't use any other software.

To create your slide show on CD, right-click on your autorun.inf and
filename.exe files and choose send to CD. Open your CD writing
folder and choose "Write these files to CD." It took 1 min 20 sec
to burn my slide show the very first time. Inserting the CD into a
second computer, the slide show began running immediately when the
CD-ROM came up to speed.

I can't guarantee this will work for everyone, but if you're having
trouble writing a slide show to CD, give it a try.