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Funcave Personals: IT Pro ISO .ISO

Been awhile, I know. Glad to be back, everybody.

Thought I’d give all the regulars to the Funcave a heads-up about a fantastic utility I found whilst I was loading up Windows Vista RC1 on the behemoth that was my former laptop.

You might recall from the Windows Mobile 5 Emulator series, particularly the Direct Push installment, that the aforementioned machine was an HP/Compaq nx9600.

I’m happy to report that RC1 loaded phenomenally well. The only issue I saw had to do with the internal WiFi card, which wouldn’t activate at all. Other than that, the nx9600 was happy as a clam with RC1.

However…from all my work this year using VPC, VS & VMware…I have become even more of an unabashed champion of using .ISO files to directly install software whenever possible.

To be sure…sometimes you can’t get around burning an actual disc, particularly if you need to use the image to boot a machine.

But comparing the speeds of installing from optical media versus a virtually mounted .ISO image is like comparing a Yugo to a Ferrari.

However, Microsoft’s freebie tool for mounting .ISO image files has always been both unsupported & crazy non-intuitive. Well, you can now add to that list the fact that it does not work at all under Windows Vista.

So I managed to find a virtual CD mounting utility that is both easy-to-use, free & “smashing, baby, yeah!”

If you need a decent .ISO mounter, check out Virtual CloneDrive from Slysoft.

Besides, it has a cool logo with one determined looking sheep:

I’ll bet their for-pay stuff sells like hotcakes in New Zealand, just from their logos alone. Maybe Jeremy would be so kind as to give us an update report?

|| posted by chris under freebie, funlab, it pro, utility belt || || ||