I’ve been having a strange disk activity issue, and I traced it to Microsoft Windows Live Messenger this afternoon. Once I close Messenger, the hitherto unexplained disk activity goes away. I queried a couple other long-time Winextra Forum members about why this app would be accessing the HD so heavily, and the response was a simple;

“Microsoft.”

   Yes, a great many people enjoy bashing Microsoft, particularly since the release of the all-but-doomed Windows Vista. However, there are a great many things that MS does quite well. Operating systems is arguably not one of them, but they’re not employing idiots in the engineer department. One argument for this is the MS PowerToys for XP at the MS download center. I’ve used several of these, and they just…plain….work. They’re not full of bells and whistles, but they solidly serve very good purposes. I’ve read that some of them started out as a few lines of code that engineers wrote for themselves or co-workers, and they simply snowballed.

   These “power toys” are, as I said, not chock full of fancy GUIs and options, usually not updated, and are not officially supported. If you have trouble with them, your best bet is to visit a tech forum and ask around.

   Yesterday, I ran across Win XP Virtual CD Control Panel. This one is pretty well hidden, it’s not listed in the usual places. Ever download a disk image, and don’t want to blow a blank cd/dvd for something you’ll use once? Mount it to a virtual drive. You’ll be able to access the image as if it were a CDROM/DVDROM drive.

   Many people prefer Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120% for this, and those are great programs, but if you just want to do quick-and-dirty image mounting, this might be the answer.

Acquisition and Installation

   I grabbed VCP from Microsoft, here. It’s very small, less than 100k. It will run under XP, either Home or Pro. Starting this up is not for Grandma Ethel. There is no installer, and a .SYS file must be copied manually to your \system32\drivers\ folder, among other things that many would call “advanced computing”. This, in my view can be a plus, since this makes the app totally portable, and can be run from a cd or USB stick. Great for those “house calls” when your mother messes up her computer after opening all those email attachments again. A TXT file is included with partial instructions on usage.

Features and Use

   Features, who are we kidding? This is a bare bones workhorse.

  Function over form. Myself, I’d prefer this to applications that crash because your video card choked on the fancy 3-D GUI.

   I clicked ‘add drive’ and it opened a drive letter. So long as there are letters left in the alphabet that aren’t already assigned to physical or virtual drives, you can keep mounting them, up to 26, obviously. I then clicked ‘mount’ and browsed to the disk image. Images on local drives and mapped network drives will both work. The program accepts .udf, .cdfs, .iso, and .rock images. A couple minor options are offered and that was all there was to it. The image file instantly appeared in Explorer and could be browsed like a drive. When you’re done with it, simply highlight the image you’re done with and click ‘eject’. It’s gone.

Wrap up

   I skipped my usual ‘uninstall and system friendliness’ section for the simple reason that neither apply. There is no installation other than moving the driver file, and to be honest, you could point the app to the SYS file anywhere. It doesn’t have to be in the \rootfolder\. Resource usage is almost nil.

Pros: Small, fast, simple, dependable, portable

Cons: No support, bare-bones, no features

Conversation Tags: Microsoft, powertoys, disk images, ISO, software, freeware