I have always read it is best to burn at a little less than the max for your drive (my max is 48x so I burn at 32x). How good of advice that is I really don't know. What I think makes a bigger different is the burning software you use. What Microsoft uses in XP is licensed from Roxi and isn't very good. Not that Roxi isn't good, but this is a "lite" version of an "older" version of Roxi (and I have had more than my share of bad burns from it). I now use Nero and swear by it, but any of the top brands will be much better than the XP default (Nero,Roxi,etc.). I have CD backups of the original exe's and zip's as well as my runtime that has been zip into several files. Both work fine, but the latter is more convenient when I do a reinstall (do need to use WinRar when unzipping really large files). If you are asking if it is better to zip a file as opposed to not zipping....zip will be a lot faster for both reading and writing. SWAMP