A:
Oooh, good question! We've actually been getting a lot of e-mails here in the office lately about this very thing. It seems as if a lot of you don't know if your computer has a burner or not and if you're one of them, you've come to the right place. There's a very easy way to check on that and I'm going to show you how right now!

There are a couple of things you can do. For starters, you can open up your CD/DVD ROM drive and look on the front of the tray. There should be some sort of logo written on the very front of the tray telling you if it's a burner or not. If it just says something like "CD Drive," there probably isn't a burner there. If it says CD/DVD R-RW, you do have a burner. That's the easiest way to tell.

The other thing you can do is look in the Device Manager. To get there, right click on the My Computer icon on your desktop. Choose Properties and then click on the Hardware tab. Once you're there, click on the Device Manager button and you will be taken to a list of all the hardware you have on your system. Double click on DVD/CD ROM Drive to expand it. If an extension comes up that says something like CD-RW or DVD-RW, you have a burner. If anything comes up at all, you more than likely already have a burner in your computer.

Once you figure out if you have one or not, you just need some burning software and you can go to town, burning CDs and DVDs as you wish! Some burners are external, so you may have that option as well. Most newer computers automatically come with a burner, but otherwise, you have to request one to be installed. If you don't remember requesting one, you probably don't have one, but use the above guidelines to know for sure!

~ Erin