That’s a lot of money and effort 
.
Whatever floats your boat, but I installed my HSO in less than 10 minutes after downloading Virtual Clone .
This is a direct link to the installer:
http://static.slysoft.com/SetupVirtualCloneDrive.exe
edit: Oh wait, that installer is in Dutch 
. Let me find the english one.
edit2: mmh, even CNET links to the Dutch installer. Oh well, you can try installing it anyway, depending on how good your Dutch is 
. It’s fairly straight forward though, and once installed you can change the program language to English (or many other languages for that matter). When it’s done installing you’ll find a new icon in your taskbar, and if you rightclick it, hit ‘instellingen’ and go the the ‘taal’ tab you can change languages. From there on it’s very easy to use. Tell it to mount your ISO and you can open it from explorer like a regular CD/DVD.
Anyway, I just read that if you doubleclick an .ISO file in windows 8 it’s automatically mounted, you shouldn’t need any additional software for that. That would by far be the easiest way to do it.