Virtual CloneDrive is a software that emulates up to eight virtual CD and DVD drives on the system. Each appears in Windows Explorer with its own drive letter and the user can perform the usual operations such as installing software from or exploring the CD or DVD that has been mounted.

The software works by adding two new entries to the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer that only appear when right-clicking a virtual CD drive. That makes mounting and unmounting new images overly complicated. I liked how Daemon Tools provided a system tray icon that could be used to mount and unmount images easily.

Several popular image formats are supported including iso, dvd and img but it does not support all the image formats that were supported by Daemon Tools Lite.

The software has a low computer memory consumption while it is running. It used up only 3 Megabytes of computer memory while emulating one virtual drive. Raising that number did not have a huge impact on the memory consumption.

The application had to be started again to add or remove virtual CD drives from the system. Mounting and working with those CD and DVD images on the other hand was uncomplicated. The application lacks an interface that is accessible while using it. It would also be nice to be able to mount images by right-clicking them or loading them from the program’s interface. Currently the only other option available is to assign the file extensions to Virtual CloneDrive so that a double-click would mount them.