Alcohol 120%: 240 Proof Proves Intoxicating Alcohol 120% in Practice Scott Koegler
Alcohol 120% in Practice
I installed Alcohol 120% on my desktop computer and was up and running in just a couple minutes. The main menu consists of a series of wizards and an Options section. After inserting a DVD into a drive I clicked the Image Making Wizard, which let me select which drive to read and copy to the hard drive. I selected the only track on the disk and then selected the destination for the image. I also selected a shared drive so that I could run the program from any computer on my LAN.
After clicking Next, the disk contents were copied to the hard drive and the Alcohol display showed the virtual DVD on its list of drives.
Only with Alcohol
One potential limitation with the software is that you can only run your virtual drives from within the Alcohol menu. If you browse to the folder using Windows Explorer you will see the files but won't be able to run them. Alcohol does offer the option to record the image in various formats, including the Standard ISO image file, a CloneCD Image file (.CCD), or a CDRWIN Image file (.CUE). I used the default Media Descriptor Image file format (.MDS) for my tests.
Alcohol's capabilities certainly aren't limited to copying CDs and DVDs to your hard drive; the program's wizards will also walk you through burning an image to CD/DVD and copying from one CD/DVD to another.
Alcohol 120% worked equally well on my Toshiba M35 laptop connected to my network. I was able to select the shared drive where I had previously saved my DVD images and let Alcohol scan the drive. It found all 3 of the disks I had imaged and allowed me to add them to the Alcohol virtual drive list on my laptop.
Speed Reading
Back on the speed theme, there is no question that reading a file from a hard disk is faster than reading from a CD/DVD drive. If you've ever been playing a DVD-based game or running a program that relies on data stored on a CD, you already know about having to wait for the disk to spin up before you can continue playing or working. The same kinds of delays show up when you start the program.
The CD/DVD drive in my desktop computer has a transfer rate of 7,200 KB/sec while the hard drive-based virtual drive can transfer at 30,000 KB/sec. With my virtual CD/DVDs I was able to run programs without any pauses. Programs varied in their load time, but the average time to start up applications from virtual disk was about 1/3 what it was from an actual DVD.
What Else?
Alcohol 120% doesn't replace your regular CD burning software. It will only create disks by copying existing disks or by creating CD and DVD copies from the virtual disks you've created. But moving your collection of disk-based programs and games to your hard drives will reduce your wait time and any worries you have about losing or damaging your original CDs and DVDs.
Alcohol 120% is available online for around $50.00 depending on the conversion value of US Dollars to Euros. A free 30-day evaluation release can also be downloaded from the Alcohol Software Web site.
Pros: Protects your original CDs and DVDs by copying them to your hard drive, allows for much faster access and operation of digital media data compared to CD/DVD drives, inexpensive, easy to use
Cons: Can quickly consume your hard drive''s free space, virtual drives can only be run from within Alchohol''s interface; won''t replace your CD burning software, as it only copies existing disks
