I have been using Nero (Ahead Nero) Burning ROM for years as my preferred software for burning CD’s on Windows. The old versions of Adaptec CD Creator were pretty good, but when they spun it off to Roxio it went down hill so fast even my stomach dropped. Back to the point, I have been using and buying Nero for years and it’s always been a great product. As much for the CD burning tools and the other goodies they toss in. One thing that I especially liked was a tool called ImageDrive. For anyone that doesn’t know what that is, it’s a nifty tool like DaemonTools that lets you take an ISO file (or NRG) and mount it as a virtual CD drive. So Windows thinks it’s just another drive and you can use it as such. Great, huh?

Well, now comes the driver for this post. Recently I got a new Alienware computer that came with Vista. Funny how it would have cost me money to down grade to XP, but I digress. My Nero version 6 was not compatible with Vista, and Nero had no plans to make it so. Well, I thought, it had been a couple years so I payed up and got the latest and greatest version 8 so I would have full Vista goodness. Now, this was my fault initially because I made an assumption, and we all know how that goes. I just assumed that ImageDrive would work as it always had, but it didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even see it.

OK, I go do some digging on line and find that Nero 8 didn’t support ImageDrive on Vista. Well, it was new (Nero 8 and Vista too I guess), and it read like it was coming soon so I figured it was some kind of Windows thing and would be along shortly. Advance a few months and nothing, no word on it at all. Finally I email support and ask them about it, I really was missing this tool, and here is the reply that I got back.

Thank you for your e-mail and your interest in our software.

Unfortunately, Nero has dropped the imagedrive application from our software. Nero will no longer support this application.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Hmm. Gee, that’s nice. At this point I kinda felt cheated. Yeah, I know, I should have read up on it more before I bought it. However, I thought I had some trust built up with these guys. I have been buying their software for years now, several versions in fact. It wasn’t clearly stated that ImageDrive was gone for good, it was rather ambiguous. The point is that the version I had worked fine, they just made a decision that if you wanted to use it on Vista, you had to uprage. Then they didn’t tell me I was loosing functionality. So I had to pay more, and get less. I wrote back and told them that too, but I doubt I’ll hear anything back from them.

So, the end result of this post is that if you are a consumer, don’t by Nero if you want ImageDrive. If you don’t care about that, it’s still a great CD/DVD tool. If you are a business, take good care of your customers because we are a fickle bunch and once scorned we don’t come back easy.

By the way, before the flame comments start, I know I can just use DaemonTools or some such similar program. That though, wasn’t the point.