This week we have the CD/DVD equivalent of a Swiss Army knife: The VirtualDrive Utility & Burning Suite from Farstone, which, for the sake of brevity, we shall refer to as "Vdbs."

Vdbs is, as they say in the marketing biz, "feature packed!" It lets you access images of CDs and DVDs stored on your hard drives or on the 'Net, will create a "virtual hard drive" (aka a RAM disk) for disk-intensive work and exact copies of CDs and DVDs, and allows you to compile and burn CDs and DVDs.

The CD emulation facility is particularly cool. We've played with other CD drive emulators but Vdbs seems to be the most flexible and stable we've come across. The installation process adds a new device driver that provides the drive emulation. You can configure up to 23 virtual drives, which also can be defined as Windows shares.

All Vdbs functions are accessed as options of a common control panel application called VirtualDrive Utility & Burning Suite.

CD emulation management is done through the VirtualDrive Manager option. This displays a list of real and virtual drives as well as "cabinets" - collections of CD and DVD images stored in Farstone's VCD format.

You can import ISO disk images as VCD files - a process so fast that we suspect the difference between Vdbs' own uncompressed VCD format and ISO format is minimal. (However, it is a shame that Farstone chose the extension VCD for its format, as there is a CD format - Video Compact Disk - which uses the same extension name.)

Uncompressed VCD-formatted files can be converted to ISO images, but obviously there's a benefit to compression for certain types of content. We tried imaging the Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 CD to Vdbs' VCD compressed format and saw a compression of less than 6%, which we suspect is caused by the already compressed content on the disk. On the other hand, for music and data disks we imaged, we saw compressions of 20% to 30%.

When you image a CD you also can define which program is to be automatically executed when the virtual disk is opened, a facility useful for disks that aren't set up for normal "autorun" operation.

VirtualDrive Manager lets you insert or remove a VCD image into or from a virtual drive, and browse the VCD image contents (note that you can't copy or change anything in the image using VDM - you'll have to use the virtual drive to copy content). Using VDM, you also can back up VCD images to real CDs and DVDs, protect them with passwords and delete them.