The Commander Steps In

Most of you should know by know all there is to know about the ISO file format and disc images, and if you feel that you need more info, go grab it, the Internet is full of it, and my purpose now is not to teach you about this topic.

What I am going to do in the next hours is to play with a program called ISO Commander and tell you what's nice, what's ugly and some final words about it. First of all, I should say that I have here the trial version labeled 1.6 build 040 that comes as a small installation kit almost one megabyte in size. The setup process is very quick, all you have to do is click Next until there's no such button available...and then the game is on!

The program's interface is nice and easy to use, being extremely simple, so you can't miss your target with it. The first thing that gets in your way when you start the program is the nag screen with a countdown that makes you wait for five seconds before firing up the commander. Once you're in, you can notice a menu bar, a toolbar and a main work area, that's all. Now, let's check what can be done with this program.

When talking about an ISO tool's features, first thing that should be checked is the list with the file types supported for opening and saving. ISO Commander can open most of the notorious image files, such as NRG, BIN, CUE, MDF and, of course, ISO. Unfortunately, once you create or modify an image, it can only be saved as an ISO file.

Once you have created an image, you can choose the Save and Run option from the File menu, which allows you to run an external tool for the recently saved file. This way, you can mount the image into Daemon Tools or burn it using Nero, but unfortunately there's no easy way to burn an image from ISO Commander, using a graphical interface, the way you can do it in UltraISO, MagicISO and many other programs belonging to this family.

The Action menu doesn't have any interesting options, just basic ones, like creating a new image, extracting files from the one currently opened, if any, or regular file operations (add directory/files, create folder) inside that image.

I found that the Generate Report function from the Info menu is not working, and I can't tell exactly why, since the only known limitations of the trial version are the 30 days period, the nag screen and the 300MB image saving maximum size, so this should work.

This program can extract boot images from floppy in order to create bootable ISO images, with the tools available in the Boot menu.

The toolbar items can be added and deleted as you like, using the Customize Toolbar option, available in the View menu, while the general settings can be found inside the File menu, or if you want a quick way to get there, using the Ctrl+F7 keyboard shortcut. There are some interesting options here, like the ability to create custom image sizes, associate external tools for certain operations or choose one of the available languages, over twenty in number.

This is it; now let's move to the conclusions, shall we?

The Good

ISO Commander is light and easy to use, allowing you to perform basic tasks quickly, without any headaches, like adding or removing files to an image or creating new image files from your optical discs.

The Bad

The bad parts seem to surpass the good ones, unfortunately, since the available features are not at all enough for a commercial product, the documentation covers only basic topics and the price is huge when put next to its competitors.

The Truth

The only answer that I can give to this program is NO, NO, NO! Go freeware, guys, or work much, much harder, because no sane person would spend the money that can buy UltraISO, MagicISO or other great programs for this! I am sorry to say this, but it's the truth, and I hope that things will be much better in the future.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: