Joe, I’ll always vote in the “don’t use glue-on labels” camp. “Bad Printer Alignment” is a blessing in disguise.
Of course, there aren’t too many printers that do direct-on-disk printing anymore - Epson being the main source (their Artisan series is excellent, and their newly delivered Expression PREMIUMs provide identically good mechanics. The Expressions also have a [B][I]HOME series that do not offer[/I][/B] disk-printing).
Every month or 6-weeks, the Epson Store Specials or Clearance have Artisans or Expression Premium 600s in the $99 range. The Artisans are being phased out and the 700 series might be offered in the $70 range, as well - those are my favorites.
TWO BIG REASONS TO AVOID GLUE-ON LABELS…
[B]ONE,[/B] even if the glue-on attachment process is perfect (each and every time? Never off center? Never a ripple or bubble? Yeah… riiiight - been there, tried that), the glues WILL age and WILL create bubbles all their own. And nothing stops this change in chemistry over time. Even if steamroller’d on, the glues will still age, give off gases and eventually create a bubble. By that time, now that extra layer of thickness is extra-extra thick, preventing smooth playing - or perhaps any spinning at all. If that bubble is torn inside the disk-player, then there’s a chance the drive-itself is now injured permanently.
[B]TWO…[/B] the expense. A Plain Disk plus the Glue-On Label is more expensive than highest quality InkJet Printable Disk alone. Why spend any money (much less more) on a Glue-On that will fail eventually?
Of course, WHAT TO DO WITH THE HP PRINTER is a big question. I run both. I have plain-paper needs that the HP never fails to complete.
I have used the Memorex software but can’t offer guesses on printer alignment issues. I like this software because it offers one wonderful graphics-editing feature - the ability to deform a picture by grabbing different corner-points, allowing deformations to exist on all axes, instead of just Horizontal or just Vertical.
Nero is offering a free label-maker package, by the way, which I haven’t tried even though I’ve had the pay-for version for years. I tend to use the $20 Surething product, or CorelDraw.
I wish they’d adopt Memorex’s excellent little Deform feature, though. (Fortunately, I can start up Memorex, do the Deform to my heart’s content, COPY to Clipboard Memory and PASTE the now-deformed image into my other labeling products.)