Free virtual CD ROM for Windows 2.1
March 27, 2011 by admin
Filed under Software patches and updates
Works with:
Windows XP
Requires
Windows XP and unofficially Windows 2000.
Size of patch
0.06MB
Name of file
winxpvirtualcdcontrolpanel_21.exe
Author/Supplier
Microsoft
About
This free program for Windows lets you generate a virtual CD drive on your hard disk. Some visitors to the site have confirmed the virtual CD program also works with Windows 2000, although it was designed specifically to run on Windows XP only (Windows 2000 support is not said in Microsoft’s official readme). For someone unfamiliar with the terms ‘virtual CD’ or ‘CD emulator’, they mean that you can copy the whole contents of a CD-ROM to your hard disk and run the programs or access the files without the necessity for the original CD to be in the drive. This can make files more available, faster and more convenient. Given the speed and size of today’s hard drives, you could basically fit a giant number of CDs onto your hard drive without noticing the difference. Assuming you had 30 full CDs, these would take around 20GB on a hard drive and all will be available after a few clicks of a mouse.
Apart from the convenience, a virtual CD gives you faster access speed. Hard drives are about 10 times faster than a CD, and you can instantly access the files through the virtual CD in lieu of grabbing the CD case, inserting the CD and awaiting for the contents to load. It is true, you could try copying the files over to the hard drive, but this can get messy, and some programs require a CD to be loaded in order to run. This virtual CD program ‘pretends’ it is a CD drive (although the files are on your hard drive), so your programs will run as normal.
There’s three tricks with this free emulator:
It only runs on XP and unofficially Windows 2000.
Your CDs must be converted to ISO files. That is not as hard as it sounds. Programs like Nero can do it, but there is another free tool for XP that will let you generate ISO files in a flash. For more information see http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com
Most types of copy protected CDs cannot be used by the emulator.
As mentioned above, this program is free, and it is absolutely small at 0.06MB. There’s plenty of similar commercial programs around, but they will set you back $50-$100 and can be substantially larger.
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