Upgrading my desktop system to Windows Vista RTM has been a positive experience for the most part, but I hit a few snags that required me to turn to third-party software.
For one, Vista doesn't seem to have an easy way to burn an .ISO image to disc (if there is a native way to do it, I'd love to know about it) and my older CD/DVD burning program is explicitly not compatible with Vista. (That program, CDBurnerXP, is being extensively rewritten, and when its next iteration appears, I'll discuss it in detail.)
After some puttering around, I found a tool that more than did the job: TeraByte Unlimited's freeware tool BurnCDCC. These are the same folks who created the disk management utilities BootIt Next Generation and Image for Windows/DOS/Linux, which outperform many commercial products that cost exponentially more.
You don't have to install anything to work BurnCDCC, a single, self-contained .EXE file (a mere 144K) that you can throw on a USB flash drive and take with you as part of your on-the-go software toolkit. To use it, just put in a blank CD or DVD, select an .ISO image to burn to it, choose any applicable options (you'll probably want to select "Finalize") and hit Start. It worked fine with both of my DVD burners, and correctly detected both drive and media speeds without any work on my part.
One thing the program won't do is create an .ISO image from a set of files or folder. But there are other free tools which can do that, such as ISO Buster.
About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Insight, (formerly the Windows Power Users Newsletter), a blog site devoted to hints, tips, tricks and news for users and administrators of Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista. He has more than 12 years of Windows experience under his belt, and contributes regularly to SearchWinComputing.com and SearchSQLServer.com.
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