Nero 7 Review

Nero StartSmart

Nero StartSmart is a program created to help you choose any of Nero's applications for the task you need doing and can be considered the heart of the program. In essence it is a wizard that helps point you the right way and there are a lot of options to select from. Most of the categories you see here are also reflected back in the start menu. This maximizes the user experience by making it easier to find what you need with each category housing a new set of programs to choose from.

The categories consist of favorites, data, audio, photo and video, backup and extras. In the start menu you'll find these categories too with manuals, play, labels and share in addition, but without the favorites.

Clicking on an icon on the Smart start picture below will bring up a new window explaining these options in more detail. We hope this helps you navigate around and get a feel for the software.

I could list all the possibilities that Nero StartSmart has under each category, but by the time I finish, most of you will already have dozed off. So I'll do a brief summary, the favorites category contains the recently used links from the rest of the categories. In data you'll find everything data related, copy CD/DVDs or make a CD/DVDs etc. Getting to the audio category, you have making audio CD/DVDs, converting audio, making different types of audio CD/DVDs etc. With Photo and Video there's truly a lot of possibilities, like making video CDs, DVD video, convert and recording video etc. The backup category has everything backup based, including making backup copies of CD/DVDs. Last but not least the extras, here you find a lot of useful tools. Things like Test Drive, Get System Info or Control Drive's Speed etc.

This table shows the categories in the Windows Start Menu and their corresponding programs. The programs that are not mentioned, but are available on the desktop or in the start menu are Nero Home, Nero Products Setup and Nero StartSmart. I will try and shed some light on all of these programs in the upcoming pages.

Most of the main programs that you see in the Nero 7 suite are available in Nero 6. The programs have had a small makeover and in some cases added features. Also the icons have been revamped to fit the new color scheme, making everything that much more colorful and vibrant. You can see some of the new icons in the table below.

Some of the new icons used in the Nero suite Nero CDSpeed Nero DriveSpeed Nero Infotool Nero SoundTrax Nero Wave Editor Nero Express