Ahead Nero Burning Speed suggestions

HI. I got a new cd-rw: Buslink (Device Manager says LiteON!). Needed it for Mandrake install, got it for $20.

Anyway, its bundled w/ Ahead Nero. Seems like good software. Express is intuitive, seems to work fine.

Question: i generally use 48x media, "name brand" stuff, TDK, Fuji, etc...

Should I slow down the burn speed to say 32x to avoid mistakes, or should I "let it rip" at 48x?

Using it to copy iso distros of Linux for friends, wanna get it right. Not sure if slowing it down would screw something up, either.

 

The IT boys where I work burned an important PowerPoint for one of the execs, at 40x, tested it in the office and it worked. The Exec first ran it on his laptop at the meeting, and it didn't work. IT caught hell, and didn't know why it didn't work. I suggested they burn important things at a lower speed, and they haven't had that problem since.

Under a microscope, the colored dots from a burn look like mud balls thrown against a wall... very ragged and irregular, not like professionally pressed disks. The faster you burn, the more ragged the dots are. For stuff for your own use, fast is probably fine, as your drive was designed to read that. For compatibility with strange drives, particularly older CDROM drives that didn't have burned disks in mind, the slower the burn, the better the chance that the target drive will be able to read it properly.

One that I burned for a friend at 40x worked fine in his burner, but wouldn't work in his plain CDROM drive. For stuff for other people, I generally burn at 24x, and haven't had any problems with that... yet.

 

when burning with nero, tick the box that says "Determine maximum write speed" and if you want to be EXTRA sure-safe tick the box that says "Verify Data on disk" (Or something similar to what i said)

 

Well, thank you both.
Since now I know that indeed slower=better,
I'll go ahead with 24x, just to be sure.