What is Reddit's opinion of Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

And if you don't have Windows 8, here's an old, but quality piece of software from Microsoft that lets you do pretty much the same thing. It's small and gets the job done. Works on Windows 7 and previous!

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38780

Edit: and it's portable!

If you use it in the right place it makes a world of difference.

For example diablo3 on release had horrible loading times and only required ~8gb of ram, andthe full install was just under 8gb. Making an 8gb ramdrive and copying over all the files to it was a clear improvement, as you could frontload all of your load times.

I agree it's probably not worth the effort for 99% of the users, but thats true of a lot of functionality built into windows, so I don't see why this couldn't make the cut. One of the biggest annoyances I've had with previous versions of windows is I know microsoft has some awesome tools(the entire sysinternals bundle for example), but they never make their way in to a default install so it might as well be any third party tool at that point.

Or hell look at mounting isos. Very standard functionality built in to pretty much all other OS's by this point. Does microsoft have it? Well, not built in, but you could install their tool to do it rather than one of the third party ones that get bundled with crapware. That's been a solution since winxp, yet just now it's finally getting bundled in to the OS.

No new hardware... though "virtual" hardware. I downloaded and installed Microsoft's Virtual CD Control Panel (for ISO mounting). EDIT: This was done last night.

I guess that could have triggered it... still. I've added virtual drives to machines before and never triggered a re-activation. I've swapped GPUs and CD/DVD drives without re-activations...

Maybe because it's Microsoft's software?

Yes. But I'd recommending uninstalling Daemon Tools. Rebooting if it asks for it, and installing the following instead: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38780

Then re-install Daemon Tools in Windows 10 if there's a Windows 10 version available. If Daemon Tools is anything like Alcohol doing these steps will save you some headaches from not being able to upgrade/uninstall Daemon Tools later.

If you need to be convinced to install an upgrade you're doing something wrong. Part of the upgrade story has to that the main things you like has to be the same or better, it wasn't.

More people than not never took the step to 8 and stayed with 7 or XP as proven by numbers. You can blame consumer ignorance, but that's simply not true the satisfaction numbers were based on actual users of Windows 8.

Your anecdotal personal experiences don't matter, what matters is the numbers among the masses. My personal experiences with users are opposite to yours, which also means very little.

Personally if Classic Shell didn't exist I would have refused to go to 8 and ran it in a VM for dev purposes.

Windows 8 was not faster than 7 to me, because there is no tangible difference between 1 second and .9 seconds, if it even existed. Plus Windows 8.0/8.1 was too new in the market and had less hardware support so for many it was a non starter.

The UI, like Windows 10, is objectively more confusing to use with its schizophrenic tablet/desktop UI mix where some settings exist in a tablet like interface and some settings in the classic interface.

I've met people who used 8 in a store or on other people's computers and refused to ever consider it until I showed them Classic Shell.

Native ISO mounting is not a selling point, you can do that better with freeware (http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html). or with a free Microsoft Windows 7 addon (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38780).

Multiple display support even in 8.0 and 10.0 is still garbage. Anybody serious about multiple displays uses a 3rd party application, either freeware or commercial. I personally use Display Fusion.

Daemon Tools: http://www.daemon-tools.cc/home
Virtual Clone Drive: http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html
Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38780

> The same can be said about ISO mounting. The CDROM is dead and Windows still can't mount an ISO.

Aside from Windows 8, there's apparently an official Microsoft tool for XP/Vista/7. I'm sure it's recent, but as of today, any Windows since XP can mount an ISO.

In that case, you mount it as a virtual disc drive. Windows 8 has this function built-in. If you're running Win7, get this. If you run into any issues you can try Daemon Tools instead.

Adding my support to taw94's comment. I've used Virtual CloneDrive off and on for years for this purpose. For what it's worth, last year Microsoft did finally release a tool for mounting ISOs on XP / Vista / 7, but it doesn't work perfectly in Windows 7 from what I've read.

Native mounting of ISOs was one of the nice improvements in Win 8 / Server 2012 (that should have come years before).