Virtual drive software isn't new, but with the recent surge of ultra portable notebooks that do not have built in optical drives this is a good time to go over one of the free emulation software out there, Slysoft's Virtual CloneDrive.

For those that may not know, a virtual drive emulates a physical drive, in this case an optical drive. This way you can mount a disc image and use it as if a physical disc was inserted into an actual drive.

CloneDrive gives you the ability to mount up to 8 virtual drives at once. Simply right click the virtual drive under My Computer and select the image you would like to mount or just double click the image file itself.

One nice feature of CloneDrive is that it also shows a history of what's been mounted before making it easy to swap out images without the need to browse your computer.

Keep in mind that you will need to convert your CD/DVD to an image format before using CloneDrive. But once you have, loading programs are only a mouse click away.

• Parallels' Coherence feature, which lets you use Windows application windows within OS X instead of in a Windows "box", now supports Expose, OS X's zoomed-out, view-all-windows mode.
• Macintosh folders can now be mapped to Windows/DOS drive letters to cut down on navigating (before you had to create a network place).
• Virtual Machine hard disk images can now be mounted to the Mac OS X desktop.
  
• Windows windows now have OS X drop shadows in Coherence mode.
• The iPhone can be synchronized with the Windows virtual machine.

[Via TUAW]

• Booting a Boot Camp Windows XP installation, allowing you to have the best of both worlds (Boot Camp is Apple's free utility for allowing you to run Windows XP on a separate partition - not in virtualization)
• Drag and drop files/folders between Windows and Mac OS X (previous, Parallels Desktop allowed you to set up a Shared Folder to accomplish this sharing task. This new feature, of course, is far cooler)
• Read/Write of aforementioned Boot Camp partition
• Parallels Transporter Beta - a new tool for migrating a Windows PC image, VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC VM into Parallels
• Graphics performance and improvements (though, unfortunately, no full 3D hardware acceleration support - yet)

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 takes advantage of new hardware virtualization technologies present in Intel and AMD systems. The idea is to use Virtual PC 2007 to run legacy applications, including operating systems in it, as it has always been with Virtual PC. This release has one slight difference, Vista now runs as either host or guest operating system in this latest version. The beta is available via the Microsoft connect website. So if you don't really want to ruin your pristine machine by putting Vista on it, now you can run Vista inside a virtual machine, and all you need is good enough hardware. If you have a connect account (free) go directly to the details page for Virtual PC 2007 beta, then click downloads on the side of the page. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit editions are available.

Microsoft has unveilled a technology preview of a new part of its web-based Windows Live Local called Virtual Earth, which includes not only a satellite view like we're used to but also street-level photographs. It's a bit like A9's Block View, but has views in four directions instead of two, and it has a wild driving mode that lets you cruise around the streets like you're actually there. Sort of. It's definitely cool, but at the moment pretty impractical. When "driving" it's hard to stay on the streets and sometimes the views you get are unpredictable. Between this and the 45-degree aerial view that made its debut back in December, Microsoft is definitely up to some very cool stuff with Windows Live Local, but they've got a lot of kinks to work out before it crosses the line from cool into useful. However, in its current state it still might come in handy for people who navigate by landmark. Currently Seattle and San Francisco's city centers are the only areas covered by the photos.