Anyone heard of PowerISO? (Yes, that includes you, reaper)

Of course you have.

If you’ve ever come across DAA images, you’ll have run into the same brick wall I have many a time. The only program that’ll easily mount these is PowerISO. I had the displeasure of having to install this shitware a couple of days ago. BAM! Instant problems.

Where do I start?

• It’s slow. Like, REALLY SLOW. Every right-click is now accompanied by a ~10sec delay as PowerISO’s context menu integration kicks into life. Even on the system tray icon.
• Constant bluescreens. I’m under the impression that it’s because PISO is chewing through kernel memory like it’s going out of fashion.

So, I have these precious few nuggets of advice to share with the world.

1. DON’T buy it! You’re throwing your money away.
2. If you download .daa images via BitTorrent, don’t seed them (or I will personally find where you live and smite you down).
3. Finally, if you do end up with a .daa image, use daa2iso to convert it to an ISO, which you can then mount using something far superior like WinCDEmu. daa2iso is an open source utility that will convert .daa images (which are really just renamed .iso.Z files, compressed using zlib, no more) to ISO’s. Windows version here, unix users can simply (iirc) zcat whatever.daa > whatever.iso for the same effect.

Remember folks, open standards are the future! Badly written crapware most definitely isn’t.