Main Window
CD-DVD Speed is freely downloadable from its
webpage and is contained in a ZIP archive. The first thing to do is extracting the executable from the zip file in a folder. The user can choose any folder, because CD-DVD Speed doesn’t require installation, but it's a standalone executable.
When CD-DVD Speed starts, you'll see the main window, that appear as in the following image:
Main window contains various elements, that will be described in detail.
In the top-left corner, there is the menu bar:
Right below the menu bar there is CD-DVD Speed's logo. On the right there is a Combo Box from which is possible to select the drive to be tested. In this example, there are three optical devices connected to the computer, all listed in this box.
Important: In this box CD-DVD Speed shows not only what drives are present in the computer, but also
the exact drive model and
the firmware installed in each drive.
The red square shows drive model, and the green arrows show the firmware installed in each drive.
On the right of the drive list there is a little button:
This button allows you to open the window containing the global options of CD-DVD Speed.
Finally, on the right there are two buttons, "
Start" and "
Exit". When a test is running, the "
Start" button changes it's name and becomes "
Stop". Its function is pretty intuitive: it allow to interrupt a test if the user decides to do it.
In the window upper bar is showed the name and the version of the software. In the right there are two other little buttons.
The button showed in the pic with the number
1 is for "
Clipboard Copy". Pressing this button, all the content of the main window is copied in the clipboard as a picture, and can be pasted in any graphic software (like MS Paint for example) to allow any modification the user wants to do.
The button showed in the pic with the number
2, with the little floppy disc, is for "
Save" the main window appearance on hard disc. Pressing this button opens a "Save as" dialog window asking where image must be saved.
The picture can be saved in various formats:
- Bitmap (*.bmp)
- JPEG (*.jpg)
- Portable Network Graphics (*.png)
- Tagged Image File Format (*.tiff).
For practical uses, the best format (and the one I strongly suggest) is
PNG. Images saved in PNG format have a better quality than JPEG, but differently from BITMAP and TIFF file dimensions are much smaller. To post in the forum it's the best choice.
BEWARE: the image must be saved before to removing the media from the drive. If image is not saved, when media is removed the pic will be deleted. So to avoid to losing anything, remember to save first, and then remove the media.
In the main window there are five tabs, each dedicated to a different section of CD-DVD Speed:
- Benchmark
- Create Disc
- Disc Info
- Disc Quality
- Scan Disc
Clicking with left mouse button on each tab it's possible to open the five main sections of CD-DVD Speed. Each section is aimed at specific functions, and for convenience each section will be described in the following parts of this guide.
The last element of the main window is a text box that show to the user various information on the current executing test.
In this picture the box is empty, but we'll see in detail that during a test execution there will be some information. Right above the text box there is a bar that show the progression of the running test.