A couple of months back, I blogged about a driver to provide direct access to virtual floppy disks. Today, I’ve come across a number of sources (most notably Thomas Lee and Steven Bink), that pointed me in the direction of a similar tool for directly mounting ISO CD images in Windows XP – the Microsoft Virtual CD Control Panel. Although unsupported, and not even searchable on the Microsoft download center, this tool is referenced in the MSDN Subscriptions FAQ. There are other tools for manipulating ISO images, but what I like about this is that it simply allows me to mount an ISO as another drive in my system, in the same way that Virtual PC can capture an ISO image and use it as the CD drive.
Send to… Notepad
The UK IT industry is a small world and I frequently attend events where I bump into people that I haven’t seen for a while. A couple of months back I turned up at a course and found myself next to a former colleague from 10 years back. This week I’m attending an SMS training course at QA where the instructor is Bernie Kilshaw, who delivered much of my Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) training in my days at ICL, including all of my training for Microsoft Windows NT 5.0 (later renamed Windows 2000).
Yesterday, Bernie reminded me of a Windows tip which I had forgotten about, but which is very useful – the ability to right-click on a file and view it in Notepad (or any other chosen application) using the Send To menu.
To set this up requires the ability to view hidden folders within Windows Explorer. Once that has been turned on (in the folder options), simply create a shortcut to Notepad (or any other chosen application) in the %homedrive%%homepath%\SendTo folder.