Alcohol 120% Software Review

Installation & Setup

Alcohol 120% is extremely comprehensive, yet still simple enough for new users. While Alcohol 120% offers the full imaging and copying software, the authors have seen enough demand to help consumers who only require the image backup capability by developing Alcohol 52%.

Users cautious of system requirements need not cringe when they see the specs, as the only minimums are any Intel- or AMD-based PC and 32 MB of RAM. As Alcohol mentions on its website, the heftiest requirement definitely comes down to hard drive space, as each DVD disk can contain around 4 GB of data. Storing images on your hard drive or copying them to another disk will require more or less space, respectively.

User Interface

Personally, I love the type of interface that Alcohol 120% provides--it’s clean, it’s simple, yet still gives me all the power under each setting if I so choose. There are icons next to the main commands, making it easy to follow what does what.

The three-pane interface also makes it easy if you are a user with many images, and it's modifiable. So if you have many more virtual drives than you do actual images, you can increase or decrease the size of one of your panes. This type of control over an interface is something advanced users really enjoy.

Product Features

Features are definitely not lacking in the full Alcohol 120% program. At its core, Alcohol 120% is an advanced CD/DVD backup utility, designed to protect your original copies of any CDs or DVDs. But it’s known for much more. In addition to standard copying, Alcohol 120% allows you to not just copy to another CD or DVD, but also to copy the complete image directly to your hard drive.

The program also includes a virtual drive emulator. What that does is allow the software to create a fake CD/DVD drive, which can then load the CD/DVD image file you backed up and then treat it as if you had the actual CD/DVD in the drive. While there are other software titles available that do this, Alcohol 120% allows for an unprecedented number of virtual drives--31! That means that you could backup 31 game disks, load a virtual drive for each one, and then switch among all your games without having to get up to find the CD binder where you left them. It’s an extreme convenience, especially as you consider the games that contain multiple CDs or DVDs, which interrupt your gameplay. You can create or delete the images as you need, and can of course back them up on disk as well, if you are running out of space.

Performance

Performance for this type of CD/DVD copying or imaging software is very much dependent on the user's particular configuration—system specs as well as the model of DVD/CD-ROM drive they are using. In my experience, Alcohol 120% performed as well as any imaging software I have used, and not once did it crash. The buffer underrun indicator during a burning session is useful if you are a big multitasker. As the system requirements showed, however, unless you’re using a significantly older machine, you should have no problems using this program to its full capabilities.