System Rebuild – Update #1

After my recent need to reimage my work laptop due to….<ahem>…. “Help” from a desktop tech, there’s a couple of little things I’ve had to rebuild/re-add to the XP image of which one is:

ISO image mount

A lot of software I use comes in ISO image format, and not on physical media. Therefore, I a need something to mount the ISO images so they look like physical media to the computer. There may be fancier solutions, but I’m comfortable with Microsoft’s free “Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP ” discussed here.

<Sidebar: What’s with the name? Can it get any LOOONNGGGEEERRR or more descriptive? Good thing the author of the ISO utility didn’t work on Vista or it might be instead known as “Computer OS that took forever to release and is largely ignored but is the biggest boost to Apple since the Intel cutover”.>

Anyway, the utility doesn’t have an installer, so it’s not for the casual joe. But I think it’s simplicity is what attracts me to it. You can download it from Microsoft here.

After extracting the files by running the exe, you simply copy the VCDRom.sys file to your \winnt\system32 directory, and then run VCdControlTool.exe. I prefer to also copy the VCDControlTool.exe to the \winnt\system32 directory and then just create a shortcut to it. I then place the shortcut in the “All Users” start menu under System Utilities so it’s available to all user profiles.

One final note: the utility icon is nasty looking. To keep up appearances, I like to change the icon to something a bit more palatable, like this . I got the icon (download here) from a cool icon site at www.rw-designer.com. It has all kinds of free icons, and many of them are high quality. It’s a great site if you have an aversion to ugly icons like I do.