What kind of CD do I need in order to offload MS Word documents to storage?

If you are doing a lot of transfers between computers, a CD-RW may not be the way to go. The problem with CD-RWs is they can become nonburnable or unreadable rather quickly if used often. CD-RWs claim they can be rewritten about 1000 times but in most lab tests this number proved to be much less.

As far as the CD-RW lingo, 4X refers to the maximum burn speed. In other words, if you burned 80 minutes of CD quality music (which is approx. 700 MB of data) it would take about 20 minutes to burn to the disc.

For your needs a USB Flash Drive is the way to go. They are about the size of a roll of Chap Stick and can be kept in your pocket or on a key chain. For about $10-$15 you can get one that holds 512MB which is more than enough space if you're just transferring Word documents since these files are not that large.

The way they work is when you plug it in to the USB port of your computer the computer will automatically recognize it as another drive. Then you can save whatever you want to that drive, remove it from that computer and take it to any computer to retrieve.

A 700mb CD/RW will actually hold about 650mb of data.

If you have not worked this way before, my two burners -- a Samsung and Dell -- require me to use CD/RWs and they have to first be formatted with the software that powers the burner. After formatting, the CD can be used like a floppy.

I did this for a while until we were presented with flashdrives. They are so much easier to deal with, have come down in price, and if you watch for sales, you can get a good deal. Last week I picked up a SONY 1G for $9.99 (after rebates).

CD R means that you can only save on the cd once and for all however, there is an another type of cds: CD RW, you can save and delete data from it for about 5 to ten times depending on the quality