Burn ISO disc images directly from Windows 7

They’re a bit toward the geekier side of Windows: ISO files. You may have heard of them but not known exactly what they were. Simply put, an ISO file is an image of all the data on an optical disc, encapsulated in a single file. ISO files are commonly used for burning a perfect copy of any bootable disc, such as a recovery or boot disc.

You may have been given, or have downloaded, ISO files in earlier versions of Windows. (If you ran a beta version of Windows 7, you likely got it via an ISO-file download.) And if you did, you know that Windows didn’t provide any native provision for burning these files
to CD or DVD to make them usable. Windows users have had to resort to freeware or commercial programs to burn ISOs in the past, but users of other operating systems have been able to do so without additional software for years.

Windows 7 changes all that—and makes it super-easy, too. To burn an ISO image in 7, all you need to do is double-click on the file, choose your optical drive (preload it with an appropriate blank disc), and click Burn:

That beats having to fumble with freeware or shareware apps in Vista or XP, any day.