When installing my upgrade copy of Windows 8 I was confronted with the familiar screen listing all of the applications that I couldn’t bring with me. One of these was DAEMON Tools lite, a free program used to mount ISO images (disk images) as temporary drives in Windows. I of course uninstalled it without question, because I assumed there was some kind of compatibility issue. It turns out that this might not have been the case, however, with the addition of an almost as powerful feature built in to Windows 8. It will definitely get the job done for most.

ISO images are typically games, applications, or operating systems like the latest build of Ubuntu. The addition of this feature in Windows 8 allows you to easily burn or directly mount these images without 3rd party software. When highlighting an ISO in File Explorer, you are presented with a new “disk image tools” menu in the ribbon which can perform the two common ISO functions — burning and mounting. Also, you can quickly mount an ISO with a simple double-click.