A new utility reduces CDs and DVDs to disk-based files. Gamers will love it.

We hardly credit it anymore, but there was a time when programs had to be installed off floppies.

In fact, if memory serves, Windows 95 first made its appearance spread across more than a dozen floppies. If you lost a couple of those diskettes, or even one, you were in deep, deep trouble if you had to reinstall the operating system.

The advent of CD-based program installations was a blessing, cutting down on the number of disks we had to keep around and worry about.

Not that the CD is without its own curses.

For gamers, one disadvantage is that many games require that their CD stay in the CD-ROM drive. At home, that is inconvenient when it comes time to use the player for other purposes.

If you are the type who wants to play games on the road, you have to drag along discs. VirtualDrive provides a nice alternative. It creates an image of a CD on your hard drive. If the CD's contents are a game, you can play it off the image.

It is not just the game player who can take advantage of this sleight of software.

If you are concerned that a crucial program may crash on you while you are on the road, you can create an image of it as well, and know that in case of an emergency you can reinstall it.

A couple of problems can arise while using VirtualDrive.

One is that publishers of programs and games copy-protect their products to guard against piracy and illegal use.

FarStone says that VirtualDrive "works with all four of the major copy protections used on the most popular CD/DVD-ROM games."

That did prove to be the case with the programs I subjected to VirtualDrive's powers.

However, as even FarStone seems to anticipate, it is always possible that a game or program CD you want to image will resist VirtualDrive's imaging prowess.

FarStone does provide a couple of tools to get around a recalcitrant CD.

The tools, including one that requires you to determine the type of coding protecting the cantankerous CD, puzzled me. The printed 134-page manual did not help me.

And although it is not steep, there is a learning curve involved in using VirtualDrive.

On my first shot at the program, I tried to move intuitively through it to transfer a game to my PC.

When I tried to use the game, the PC just sat there and stared at me.

I went back and gave VirtualDrive another shot at the game.

This time, though, I allowed VirtualDrive to put the image of the game in a folder of its own choosing, not the one I had chosen the first time around. The game worked.

The VirtualDrive suite also includes a CD/DVD-burning program. It worked well enough, burning tunes to a CD quickly and efficiently.

Unlike some other programs for burning CDs, VirtualDrive has a menu for setting up a burn that includes an option for closing the CD, an instruction that tells the disc that nothing more will be loaded to it.

That is important, because a CD that has not been closed may not play on a home stereo, a car audio system, or even another computer.

The VirtualDrive suite also includes a utility for creating a RAM drive.

If your PC experience reaches back to the early days, you may remember that a favored way of speeding up the PC's work was to use part of your random access memory to create a so-called "virtual drive" and then load programs and folders into that RAM drive.

Under normal computing circumstances, a PC loads only parts of a program or file into memory.

When other parts of a program or file are needed, the PC has to reach into the hard drive, a process that slows things down.

Loading an entire program and whole files into a RAM-based drive, where they are instantly available to the central processing unit, speeds things up a great deal.

If you own a late-model PC, a RAM drive is not likely to help much. If you have an older PC, make sure you have lots of random access memory so that part of it can be set aside for the drive.

And remember to back up work often. If the PC crashes, you can kiss data in the RAM drive bye-bye.