Maggie's Farm

You would think that any program with half a brain would give you the choice during the installation as to whether or not you wanted to put all the CD's files on your hard drive or use the CD, but not many of them do.  I've got this terrific American Heritage program that's half dictionary, half thesaurus, and works just perfectly — except that the CD has to be in the drive.

In the games department, the marvelous puzzle game 'Pandora's Box' needs the CD to be in the drive, as do all of the great Hoyle games.  They'll play without the CD, but all of the animations and voices and such are gone — which is kinda the point of playing a virtual reality game in the first place.

This is an easy 4-step process:

1.  Uninstall the program

2.  Make an image file of the program's CD

3.  Mount the image file as a virtual drive

4.  Reinstall the program, this time from the virtual drive

The program has to be unistalled and reinstalled, of course, so it'll know where to find its files in the future.
 

Step 1:  Uninstall the program

If it's got some kind of personal database or 'high game score' or whatever, it might be better not to uninstall it until you know for certain that you've saved your personal files to a safe location.  Some programs remove everything when they're uninstalled, some programs only remove the files they originally installed.  So be cautious.

If it's just some normal program or game and you don't care about starting over, just pop open Control Panel, 'Add or Remove', and remove it outright.
 

Step 2:  Make the image file

Download this little package, install the two apps.

Toss the program's CD into the drive and wait a few secs.  If it tries to run a Setup program, cancel out.

Fire up ImgBurn:

• Click 'Create image file from disc'
  
  
• Select your ROM drive from the drop-down 'Source' menu
  
  
• Click on the little folder icon to the right of 'Destination' and select a permanent place for the image file
  
  
• Click on the big button on the lower-left to begin the process

Step 3: Mount the virtual drive

This presumes you've installed Daemon Tools from the above download.  Is there a red icon in the SysTray (to the right of the Task Bar) for Daemon Tools?  If not, fire it up from the Start Menu or Desktop so the icon will appear:

• If you followed the setup instructions, you'll have already selected the number of virtual drives you want.
  
  
• Click on the Daemon icon with the right mouse button, slide over to the left and pick the device you want, then back to the right to 'Mount image'.  Browse to the program's image file and select it.  If a Setup program then pops up, see the next step.

Step 4:  Reinstall the program

If the CD automatically tries to install the program when it's first inserted in the drive, it'll probably try to do it when you mounted it in the previous step.  Go ahead and install the program.  Since you're installing it from the virtual drive, it won't look for the CD in the future.

If nothing pops up when you mount the drive, open 'My Computer', then double-click on the drive's icon.  Either a Setup program will start running or the folder will open.  If the folder opens, look for a Setup program to run.

And that's it.  The program or game will now have all of its features, and, for that matter, might be more responsive since the data is coming off the hard drive, rather than having to be read off the disc.