One of the few things I’m not liking about my new system is the CD/DVD drives. They’re LOUD. Incredibly loud.

So, inspired by Kevin Rose of “The ScreenSavers” I bought a copy of Alcohol 120%. This is CD/DVD copy software, make no mistake. But it also handles the creation of virtual drives.

So I can put a game in, rip an image of it, and mount that image as a virtual drive, which is of course silent, and also very very fast! Plus I can put the CDs away somewhere safe and sound.

There is one more piece to the puzzle, and that’s determining what kind of copy protection the CD uses. For that, I snagged a freeware program called ClonyXL.

For more info, go to the source and read Kevin’s article on the topic.

Its funny how I still feel guilty about doing this, even though I’m just ripping the games I own onto the hard drive I own in order to play them! (I’ve got enough friends in the business that I don’t pirate game software.)

There are probably cheaper ways to do this. I used to have a thing called Daemon-tools that set up the virtual drives, and used a trial copy of CloneCD to rip the images, but Alcohol 120% is a fairly complete all-in-one package, only costs $50 and has some nice convenience features, like multiple virtual drives and loading an image by double clicking it. There’s a 30 day trial version if you want to see for yourself.

I just got this all setup so don’t consider this a mini-review. I’ll have to see how it all works for a couple weeks before I pass judgement one way or the other.