I am having trouble consistently burning cds with my new external cd burner. Its a mitsubishi diamond data CDRW. I have burnt one cd through windows media player but it takes a long time and I have difficulty burning anything else except accidently burning the nero cd when I was first tinkling around

I have Nero ver 5.5 and when I use the wizard it keeps burning image files instead of burning straight to the cd. When I try and burn the image file, it tries to create another image file. I have tried to delete nero, but it fails to delete. I have also tried cdrwin5, but it has buffer errors and always fails to finish writing to the cd, in the process I am running out of cds like they are going out of style. Can anyone help? The computer I have is an Acer notebook:
Celeron 1gig
256mb ram
10gig hdd
win xp home
Thanks Pretzal