We go out and buy media suites thinking that we’ll create our own home movies, add effects, then burn them to DVD and give to our friends and family. These media suites easily cost up to £50 and are everything we’ll ever need for producing and burning our disc media.

However, how many times have you just launched the disc burning part of your media suite, to create your own audio CD or to back up files to bring to the office? Face it, the plain old burning part of any media suite is the part you use most often, so why go out of your way to pay £50 for the suite on your laptop and taking vital space on your hard drive?

An alternative is a tool such as BurnAware Home Edition which is designed to burn your data and audio discs, as quickly as possible. It will support just about every burning media from a single 700MB CD through to a Blu-ray writable disc. Assuming you have a Blu-ray burner.

BurnAware is so simple and is designed to get your files to disc as quickly as possible, enabling you to take data, audio and video content and produce either a CD or DVD.

Note that since writing the above review - for the old Free Edition - BurnAware has now gone completely commercial, making available an Express, Home and Professional version (with commercial burning license).