VIRTUAL CD DRIVE MAKES IT RUN FASTER

There you are, whizzing through your daily computer work, typing documents, surfing the Internet and letting go the reigns to your creative inspirations when it all comes to a grinding halt. What caused this sudden slowdown? Was it a power failure, a hard drive crash, or maybe even the operating system deciding to lock up? While any of these conditions are an acceptable part of computing life, I'm sorry to say that this particular bogging down was caused by your CD-ROM drive. That's right. Your work was not held up by a malfunction but by a function. Compared to the rest of your computer's components, a normally functioning CD works at a snail's pace.

And what if you don't even have the proper CD loaded in the first place? Talk about having everything come to a standstill. Think about it. How many times do you have to stop everything because the running application is asking that you drop in that little silver disk in the drive. So there you go rifling through your drawers looking for the elusive CD while time ticks on by. Wouldn't it be great if you could somehow transfer the contents of all your CDs to your hard drive? After all, today's multi-gigabyte hard drives could more than likely hold the contents of all your application CDs with plenty of room to spare. Well it seems that the folks at VCom feel the same way and have come up with their "CD AnyWhere" utility software that lets you do exactly that.

CD AnyWhere lets you create one or multiple virtual CD-ROM drives on your computer's hard drive. After installing CD AnyWhere, you simply insert the CD you want to access and CD AnyWhere copies all of its data, compresses it and creates a virtual CD that's stored on the hard drive. Limited only by the number of letter drives available and disk space, you can have up to 23 virtual CD drives on your system at the same time. Virtual CDs can be selected by drag-and-drop or assign hot keys to instantly load and play the CD images. This is an ideal way to run applications that require multiple CDs to operate. And since the virtual CD can be accessed at hard drive speeds, it's like having a 200X CD-ROM drive. This speed combined with the number of virtual CD drives that can be instantly available will make your computer run as though it's been turbocharged compared to doing it the way you're running things now. And for gamers, CD AnyWhere will make game playing a better experience. One caveat is that according to VCom, CD AnyWhere will work with some but not all copy-protected CDs.

CD AnyWhere is an ideal solution for portable computers as well. Now you won't have to lug around all those CDs anymore. Works with Windows 95 or later. $39.95.

CD label maker

Creating a CD has become commonplace with every computer these days being equipped with some type of CD or DVD burner. Burning your own music disks, transferring data, backing up applications and sending virtual photo albums and movies is easy but printing labels for your creations can still be somewhat of a chore. Casio has come up with a novel CD label printer that may do the trick. Casio's CW-50 could be easily mistaken for an external CD drive but is actually a USB thermal printer that lets you create and label your CDs. The included software lets you compose, align and then apply the label in one simple operation. Choose from four different label color (black, blue, red or silver) tapes and then insert the CD to be labeled. The printer itself is monochrome so any graphic images you print will be displayed in the color tape you select. You can print different portions of the CD label in any of the supported colors.

While the CW-50 is an interesting idea, I still prefer those CD label printing kits that let you print on a color inkjet printer to a self-sticking CD label that can be manually applied to the CD. Granted that the direct thermal process of the CW-50 will make the CD look more like a factory printed disk but it's still basically a monochrome printer making it more suited to specialized applications. Requires Windows. $129.