Tip-Of-The-Week

April 6, 2007

From the Free Computer Consultant

http://www.FreeComputerConsultant.com

ISO Files and Free Utilities

For those of you who celebrate Jesus' Resurrection, Happy Resurrection Day!

For those of you who celebrate Easter - a holiday of good food, new spring dresses for the girls and lots of candy (but light on the religion), Happy Easter!

For everyone else, I hope you have today off and can enjoy a great 3 day weekend!

ISO files, for those who are not familiar with them, are a disk image of a standard CD. Many large downloadable software packages from such notables as Microsoft, among others, are packaged as ISO files. These files contain not only the data that's on the original CD, but also information about how the CD is structured and formatted. Perhaps Wikipedia describes them better.

What is useful to you, is that you can use a free tool from Microsoft to "mount" that ISO file as a virtual CD drive in Windows, and access the data just as if it were in your CDrom drive. That tool is Microsoft Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel.

Gamers can use this for more convenient and faster access to a required game CD. To create an ISO file from such a CD, I use WinISO or undisker - both are paid software, I'm afraid.

Others of us can open an ISO file without burning it to a CD with a free utility like 7-Zip. The neat thing is that 7-Zip is not only F.R.E.E, but also can be used on a variety of packaged files including Zip files.

Of course most CD burning software like Nero and Roxio will allow you to burn the ISO to a CD, but if you just want to access the files, 7-Zip lets you do that conveniently too.

As the typical software download gets bigger and bigger, I think you'll be seeing more ISO files. Now you how you can conveniently deal with them.

Side Note: You may have noticed that the FCC Site Blog is a registry of content update for the site; not my daily observations.

I have a new Wordpress blog, named Daily Insights, that is my commentary based on what I was doing on that day. Check it out, I hope you find benefit there.

Hope this information is of use to you, that's it for this week.

When was the last time you backed up YOUR PC?

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The Free Computer Consultant