Finally Nero did introduce a free version of their popular burning program for Windows. This is what they did: they took the pro version of the product, stripped away about 90% of the features leaving a very crippled Nero 9 Essential. And then gave it away for free. Nero 9 essential is basic, a very basic burning program, supporting only disc burning and CD/DVD copying operations. It supports only data disc burning. No audio CDs, no video CDs or DVDs. You can’t rip CDs or burn disc image. You can’t access any of the advanced features. Even the burning speed selection is limited. There is nothing to review about this program. There is not much to show either. And what about the bloat? The size of the installer is 55 MB, and upon installation it occupies 130 MB of disk space. 130 goddamn Mega Bytes!! And when it’s running it gobbles up 100 MB of RAM. Please skip this program and choose any one from these .