This is part 1 of 21 of a series of available apps for Windows. Check back often for the rest of the series!

The first app I’m going to talk about is ImgBurn. This is a CD/DVD-burning program for burning ISO disc images. It’s free and very easy to use.

Why have ImgBurn?

Did you want to try out a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Mint but couldn’t find an easy way to burn the downloaded ISO image to disc? Now you have one.

Did you want to build an ISO image to burn to disc later? This app has you covered.

This app is also well-programmed and solid. Never have I encountered any buggy-ness using it. It does exactly what it’s designed to do and does its job without complaint. I consider this a must-have app for anyone that uses Windows.

Burning a Linux ISO image in Windows using ImgBurn

Launch the app first. This is what you see:

(click for full size)

My particular optical burner drive is a Mad Dog TSH652D. Yours will be whatever you currently have installed in your computer.

Go download a Linux distribution ISO file. For example, you can download a Linux Mint ISO.

After that you click the small folder icon next to “Source” at the top of the app, browse for your downloaded ISO and double-click it. ImgBurn will then look something like this:

(click for full size)

Note that next to “Source” at the top left is the location to my downloaded ISO file.

After that just click the huge disc icon at the bottom (yes that is a button) and ta-da, you start burning the image to disc.

It will look something like this:

(click for full size)

After completion you’ve got a Linux distro on CD ready-to-rock!

Building an ISO image (and burn directly to disc)

Pop in a blank disc and launch ImgBurn.

While in ImgBurn click Mode then Build or just press CTRL+ALT+B.

The app should look similar to this:

(click for full size)

At this point your image file is obviously blank, so you will need to add files in order to create your image and burn it.

There are six small icons in the middle. You can either click the 2nd icon to add individual files or the 3rd icon (looks like a yellow folder) to add an entire directory.

(click to enlarge)

Above I have chosen a folder containing photos from a trip to Epcot at Disneyworld. This is what I want to burn to disc.

When I click the calculator icon (bottom right), I get this message:

(click to enlarge)

Being that I want just this folder and its contents put into the disc image, I click Yes.

I then see this:

(click to enlarge)

The above shows that all the photos burned to CD will take up 25% of the total space available on the disc. This is good because that means I’m ready to burn the image. At this point I click the large CD icon (bottom left) and burn my data to CD.

Final notes

There are some other advanced features which you can read about on the ImgBurn forums, however for the vast majority of us the Build and Burn modes are all that we care about. And as you can see, it’s really simple.