Many professional PC users are well aware of a very high-quality and functional program for working with images. Alcohol 120% is a great utility that can not only create “phantoms” of various types of disks, bypassing their copy protection, but also emulate your existing images (the latter, as you can understand, is especially important). This program will not only be able to substitute any disk image into a virtual drive, but also write to physical media.
Many domestic users have already collected so many witty jokes that are associated with the name of the application, that you can make a book of jokes from them. In fact, in English the name of the program sounds much more prosaic, it can be translated as “phantom”. Naturally,
virtual disks with good reason can be called phantom. Many users are also interested in why the name of the program includes the 120% component? The fact is that before there were two completely different programs - 52 and 68%. By combining them in one product, the developers emphasized the size of its potential.
If you have an original medium with valuable information, the loss of which can cost you dearly, then programs for creating a disk image (like "Alcohol") will help you save it. This is especially valuable for gamers: the application not only saves the disk from quick wear, but also avoids the long and tedious loading of the game. After all, this is not about a slow optical drive, but about a hard drive. And if SSD is used, then loading your favorite toy can even become almost lightning fast.
Why did it happen that when pronouncing the word “disk image” for domestic users, the Alcohol 120% program immediately comes to mind? The thing is its stunning functionality, small installation file size and excellent optimization, which allows you to comfortably work with "Alcohol" even on older computers. Agree, given the abundance of clumsy monsters like Nero, the presence of such a utility is especially nice. By the way, if you want to create a Nero disk image
(nrg format), you do not need to install a “parent” application: Alcohol supports the creation of almost all types of images.
But program skills are not limited to this. She can search for files with the necessary extensions throughout the hard drive, and in the latest versions they added a “grabber”, with which you can convert music from a CD to MP3 compressed audio format.
By the way, why create a disk image? A program or a movie can be launched directly from a physical medium! Oh, it's not that simple. To begin with, standard laser disks are extremely short-lived, and the information stored on them can be very valuable: for example, the installation kit of the program, which costs more than one thousand rubles (if not dollars). Here it is worth considering how to keep this medium intact and completely safe for as long as possible.
In addition, as already mentioned, speed can be a big advantage. Remember how long the game can load from the physical disk, what terrible sounds an
optical drive can make
, and the brakes of the game process itself should also be mentioned separately! Among other things, for
corporate clients, equipping each workstation with an optical drive may simply be unprofitable! Let's not argue, their cost has recently fallen sharply. But high-quality and reliable drives are still worth a lot, and buying cheap crafts is not reasonable.
The program itself will easily create a disk image. For inexperienced users there is a wizard that guides you automatically through all the stages of this simple operation, and for advanced users there is the possibility of fine tuning dozens of disk copy settings, as well as using their images!