There are many tools around that will mount disc images as virtual drives, allowing you to browse them in Explorer without having to burn the image to a blank disc first. And so news that PassMark Software have produced yet another may not, at first, appear too interesting.

OSFMount isn’t just another “me too” utility, though – it’s an extremely useful tool with features that you won’t find in most of the competition.

The good news starts with the program’s wide support for many image standards. As well as mounting the usual ISO and BIN images, it can also work with IMG, DD, 00n, NRG, SDI, AFF, AFM, AFD, and even VMWare VMDK images, reportedly (although the latter didn’t always work in our tests).

You also get some useful options to configure your virtual drive. So you can choose the drive type (HDD, CD/DVD, floppy), whether it’s removable or read only, and of course your preferred drive letter.

And, particularly interesting, you can have OSFMount create an empty RAM disk which may then be used however you like.

This might help you speed up a particular application if you can point its temporary files there, for example.

Or it could have useful privacy applications: save your browser history to a RAM disk, say, and its contents will disappear as soon as you reboot.

And you can even use the disk to create an image of your own. Just create the virtual drive, populate it with whatever files you like, then an OSFMount right-click Save option allows you to save your disk as an image in ISO, IMG, AFF, AFM or AFD formats.

Note there is a separate 64-bit version available.