VSO's BlindWrite 5 Beta

Product: BlindWrite Suite 5 (Beta)
Provided By: VSO Software

Introduction:  

In this day and age, software piracy is on the rise. Unfortunately that pushes software companies to spend millions of dollars researching and licensing "anti-piracy" technology to thwart would-be pirates. There are several downsides to this. The first is the increased cost of software, and the second is that this "anti-piracy" measures make it very difficult for the honest person to back up their software, especially their games.

I am not a big fan of piracy. I buy a lot of games (hence the empty wallet), but I insist on backing up my CD's as I don't want a $60CAD game to be ruined from scratches which will invariably happen. I loath the use of "No-CD" cracks as well. Some work great, but some cause major issues.

This presents a problem that VSO Software is overcoming with their line of products. Today, we are looking specifically at BlindWrite 5. I've used the trial version of BlindWrite 4, and was very impressed with it. It worked very well, especially on older games that were in their online database. To copy new versions of SecuROM or SafeDisk required a bit of messing around to find the proper Read & Write methods. BlindWrite 5 is designed to take away all the guesswork. Let's take a look, shall we?

BlindWrite has changed it's look quite a bit with this new version. It is pretty much a one-page interface that allows you to copy a disk, read the disk to an image file, as well as write a disk from an image file. It is able to read image files from every major CD burning program.

At this stage in the Beta, (4.9.9.97, and 4.9.9.100) there is only the "Automatic" Profile available. It works very well, but does not allow for custom tweaking as of yet. The final version should have more options available.

Speaking of options, we'll take a look at the Settings available from within the Options Drop-down menu. Nothing really exciting here. It allows automatic updating, and Live Assistance which will give some advice on how to backup most copy-protected CD's. At the bottom are the speed, erase, and eject settings.

So it looks different, claims to be better, and simpler to use. . . how well can it actually detect copy-protections and adjust accordingly? You'll have to head on over to the next page to find out.