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[dcwebman]

I guess this is the right forum since I'm going to ask about 3rd party software. I just got back my repaired laptop and unfortunately they wiped the hard drive so I have to start from scratch installing everything. I think I'm just going to install Win7 instead of wasting any more time on Vista. But the first problem is finding all those CDs/DVDs of my programs to install. I've done this too many times now where for some reason I can't keep every program CD in the same place so I'm going to save them all as ISO's so I can find them easier.

First, I assume since MC can store info about PDF's (although a PDF viewer/thumbnail aka Paperport would be nice), is anyone using it for ISO information too?

Second, I have tried various virtual CD/DVD programs out there in the past to mount an ISO and haven't really been sold on one yet. I would prefer free of course. One that was good stayed in memory all the time. That doesn't do me any good because I'm not going to be using that "drive" all the time, only when I need to use an ISO. So any recommendations out there?
Thanks,
Jeff

[raldo]

Second, I have tried various virtual CD/DVD programs out there in the past to mount an ISO and haven't really been sold on one yet. I would prefer free of course. One that was good

Virtual Clone Drive? It does the job for me, at least.

I found the info on Virtual Clone Drive in the MC Wiki (I think), and if you set up MC correctly, you can double click a file in MC and it'll VCD will mount the drive for you. If an iso contains a DVD, mc will start that dvd.

[dcwebman]

Virtual Clone Drive? It does the job for me, at least.

That's one I've tried before and it worked great except that's also the one I mentioned that you can't get it out of memory when not in use. You can set it to 0 drives but it still remains in memory instead of being able to unload it completely. I only need to use it occasionally so I don't need something else running.

Any other suggestions?

[jmone]

Jeff - have you tried posting over at the VCD Forum http://forum.slysoft.com/forumdisplay.php?f=21 on how to run it and not be memory resident?  I've found them very accomodating and even had them change the code to suit requirments.

[dcwebman]

I looked at their forum and the topic has been brought up more than once but there's not a solution.

[jmone]

The only option I saw on their thread is to under the "Settings --> Number of Drives" you can set it to "Disable" - you will not see any virtual drives mapped but VCD with still be running (just not doing anything).  To use, you would need to then change the Number of Drives back to at least one.  I must admit I always leave it running on my machines regardless of how often they mount ISO - never had any issue and with a memory footprint of 3Mbytes it is pretty low.

[danrien]

Personally, for ISOs, I use Daemon Tools - it's optional adware (they make it very obvious that they want to install a daemon tools branded google toolbar) that I never install - however, I'm not aware of whether it works well with MC, I guess when I mount an ISO, it works corrctly in MC.  It isn't much of a resource hog, but it does want to stay continuously on.

[dcwebman]

FYI, I ended up using Gizmo Drive in Windows 7 and it worked great. Read the recommendation here: http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-cd-emulator.htm
Even though it now includes more tools than just the drive, some of the other tools could come in handy too.
Program at: http://arainia.com/software/gizmo/index.html