You've been collecting your favorite music, pictures and videos on CDs and DVDs, but it's hard to tell them apart because they all look alike. The normal solution is to buy stick-on labels; but labels decrease the life of your media. Some people purchase CDs or DVDs with writable faces -- but you need a printer that accepts these disks as media; and there aren't too many that do.

Hewlett Packard has come up with a solution, called LightScribe Direct Disk Labeling (www.lightscribe.com). LightScribe consists of a special burner that etches onto the face of CDs or DVD disks. And it's very simple to use.

First burn your data, music or video onto your disk as you normally would. Then open the burner, flip over your media, and wait for the LightScribe prompt. That's when you can design your face -- from a few lines of text to gray-scale-like patterns and pictures. You don't get full color, but it labels your media so you can find it later.

You also can get fancy, but I noticed that doing elaborate patterns can take a while. I recently tried etching a fancy face on one of my CDs -- and it took a half-hour to complete. If you have the time, though, it could be worth the wait -- especially if you don't want to buy another ink-jet printer.

Although LightScribe burners can burn the computer data or multimedia information onto any standard disk, it only will etch the faces onto special disks made to work in the LightScribe drive. You can purchase LightScribe media from HP, Memorex, Imation or Verbatim.

HP is now shipping LightScribe drives with most of its systems, or you can buy one standalone from several vendors who have licensed the technology.