What Equipment and Tools Do I Need?

-- by Jon --

Here are some of the basic tools you will need to make a life history you can store on CD. There are other things that can be helpful if you have extra money to invest into this, but I wanted to stick with the basics for now.

CD Writer. If you plan on saving your work to a CD for distribution, make sure you have a CD writer, sometimes called a CDRW. A CDRW is a CD drive that both reads and writes the CD. Your computer may or may not have come with a CDRW. Many are read-only. I like the CDRW for making backups even if I’m not making CD’s to distribute. More...

Word Processor. Microsoft Word and Word Perfect are among the most popular word processors. More...

Photo enhancing software. We have used Paint Shop Pro 7 which we bought for around $100. It has some features for cleaning up photos that have been scanned and it also does many other graphic functions that we wanted to be able to do. There are many other photo enhancing software packages of varying prices.

Scanner. There are many types of scanners. The newer ones have more ‘brains’ and are easier to use. Loretta bought a low end model for $40 on sale. We scanned almost all of our photos using this scanner. Shop around, get to know what features you will want to use. More on scanners and scanners that will also scan slides and negatives...

Digital Camera. This is optional depending on what you want to do. A digital camera can also be used like a scanner for pictures. You can set up a place to take pictures of your photos. We also had my son-in-law use his digital Camcorder to add some video clips to our CD. More...