My Learning Experience

While surfing the net, I have come across a small little utility that can provide quite a great space saving and convinience especially when you are trying to open an archive, or CD image file.

If you have worked with archive files, you will know that you need to decompress the archive to a temporary location which will take some time depands on the size, before you can view the contents of the archive. If you want to keep both uncompressed and compressed version of the file on the hard drive, than you will need to allocate twice the space for it, besides that, you will need to have a decompression software like winzip or winrar in order to do so.

And if you have worked with CD image files, you will agree with me that most of the time you can only burn it to a CD before you can access the contents of the image, unless you have a software that can view the contents of the image directly, which is rather costly compared to a piece of blank CD.

If you can just keep a copy of the archive or image on the local hard drive and open it as and when you need, without too much time waiting and space wasting, than this software may be the answer to you.

What the software will do is to "mount" the archive or image to a virtual drive, meaning a space in your memory, and access the contents without decompression process or waiting time. You mount the file, and the next second, you can read the contents immediately without waiting for it to be decompressed to a temporary location.

For compressed files, it support .rar and .zip and other popular compression formats.
For CD images, can mount ISO, BIN/CUE, CCD, BWT, MDS/MDF, NRG, IMG, ISZ etc and play them.

Besides, you can also mount VHD, Microsoft WIM, WinMount WMT as a virtual disk;
and audio formats APE, FLAC, WV as a virtual CD.

In other words, beside your physical CD drive, you can have another 20+ drives ready for use as either virtual hard disk, CD Player, movie files and running virtual machine at the same time.

Cool? It is great!

To get it, visit WinMount. It costs USD 49.

Two months after I have passed 70-624, MCTS: Deploying and Maintaining Windows Vista Operating System and 2007 Microsoft Office System Desktop, I have managed to pass another exam, 70-631 MCTS: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Configuring. This time, with only 1 question short to get a perfect score, damn!

Anyway, it has been about 4 years since the last time I have been sitting for Microsoft Exams. I have stopped taking exam after I tried to take an upgrade exam to MCSA 2003. Before that, it was like every month I pass one exam, it was crazy. And looking back, I did the same when I planning to achieve my MCSE for Windows NT 4.0. One exam every month for six months.

And the cycle is starting again. first with MCTS on BDD, which I managed to pass at the borderline, and now MCTS on Sharpoint services. The reason is that I was trying to get the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status for my company which requires a number of Microsoft Certified Professionals and when I enter my credentials, my past credential does not count! Later after I got my MCTS on BDD only I found out that I forget to link my MCP ID!!! What a joke!

I am NOT a SharePoint admin in the company, but just a power user. But SharePoint exam is a requirement for my company to achieve "Small Business Specialist" status, and I see the software is not that difficult to master, thus just go for it. It is a great honour to pass the exam with only 1 question missed.

Not bad, indeed. So, since I am not going to for my Masters degree this year, must well go get my status renewed to Microsoft Certified IT Professional if possible. At least get something polished before go for Masters degree which I have been thinking of doing for a long time. If not because of my wife's situation, I will be studying part time now ;) Think this is blessing in disguise.

So, next paper, I should be taking 70-620 MCTS: Configuring Microsoft Windows Vista Client before attempting Exchange Server 2007 which come with 3 exams and will give me a MCITP title after I completed them.