CDs and DVDs are generally tough, and can withstand a fair amount of mishandling, but there are limits. The more often you leave discs out of their boxes, pile them up on your desk, drop them onto the floor, the more scratched they'll become. And eventually they may become unreadable - your valuable applications or data will be lost.

Alcohol 120% can help, though, by letting you work in a different way. First, easy-to-use wizards walk you through the process of backing up your CDs, DVDs and even movie DVDs (as long as they're not copy-protected) to disc image files. And then the program can mount up to 31 images of your most-used CDs and DVDs to virtual drives.

Once you've set this up then the data on these discs will still be easily accessible on your PC, but you'll no longer waste time swapping discs in and out of your drives. The authors say that applications will run up to 200 times faster than having it load from a physical drive. And because you don't need the discs to hand, you can leave them safely tucked away on a shelf, where you can be sure they're not going to get damaged.