WinArchiver Virtual Drive: A Small Tool to Mount All Popular Archives and Disk Images

Archive files are the most popular way to distribute a number of files at once. I normally deal with a large number of archives containing documents and softwares. What I hate to do is to unarchive those files because most of the times the files are not useful for later use and I end up with two copies of the files: archived one and unarchived one. I know I can delete the archives but I am too lazy to do so, LOL. But some times without unarchiving, things do not work properly, for example softwares that come as an archives.

So, WinArchiver Virtual Drive is a solution for my fellows like me. It is a Virtual CD/DVD ROM utility that can mount not only all popular CD/DVD image files, but also all popular archives. Since it is virtual it works many times faster than traditional cd/dvd rom drive.

Features

• Supports a large number of archives and disk images.

• Supports most versions of Windows.

32-bit Windows: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 2008, Windows 7
64-bit Windows: Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 2008, Windows 7

• The software is multilingual; supports 11 languages.

• It supports creation of up to 23 virtual drives.
• Installation is clean and fast and do not require a restart. You are given option to choose loading of the software tray icon & mounting of the virtual drives on system boot up and also to choose the number of virtual drives.

• You can change settings later.

• In settings you can change the temporary folder location where you want to extract the archive while mounting. by default it uses system temporary folder.
• You can also change the assignment of the virtual drive letter. By default it assigns unused drive letter automatically.
• The tray icon gives option to mount files, unmount selected or all virtual drives, set the number of drives etc.

• The tray icon also shows an innocent advertisement of their paid product WinArchiver. This is must be noted that WinArchiver is a nice application and when used in conjunction with WinArchiver Virtual Drive gives you more freedom such as to mount application from context menu of files and also to unmount virtual drives from their context menu.
• This is to be noted that whether or not you choose to Autostart WinArchiver Virtual Drive, you can use the application. To launch WinArchiver Virtual Drive simply launch it from its shortcut in start menu and you will find the tray icon.
• If you choose to Automount Virtual Drives you will be able to see the icons of blank drives in explorer but if you choose not to Automount you can see those icons only when you mount something.
• If you have mounted a file with WinArchiver Virtual Drive, it will remain mounted even if you exit tray icon.
• WinArchiver Virtual Drive uses a service for mounting and dismounting.

• If tray icon is launched, WinArchiver Virtual Drive uses two processes all the time that uses minimal resources. WAHELPER.EXE runs for the tray and WAService.exe runs for the tray.

• It required a restart to complete uninstallation. This is because it cannot stop WinArchiver Service during uninstallation.

Download
WinArchiver Virtual Drive is free to download and use . It can be downloaded from the following link.
http://www.winarchiver.com/WADrive28.exe [713 Kb]
Please note that it is the download link for the current version 2.8. You can access the download anytime from the product page.
http://www.winarchiver.com/virtual-drive.htm
The installer is yet to be digitally signed.

Enjoy !!