With ever-larger and cheaper hard disks on the market, dealing with partitions has become a big part of computing life. Partition Commander Professional 10, from VCom, is far more capable than the Disk Management tool built into Windows and makes some otherwise rather daunting tasks manageable.

It can be installed on Windows 2000 and XP Home and Professional but not the Server versions. In fact it won't work at all if there is a server operating system installed on the computer.
The interface is clean and uncluttered. There are only a limited number of tasks one can perform with disks, even though their effects should not be underestimated.

Much like Partition Magic, the left-hand side of the window details the list of available tasks. The bottom half of the main window shows the physical disks installed in the computer, with the remainder providing information about individual partitions. Different formats are colour coded.

Unlike Windows Disk Management, Partition Commander can recognise partitions formatted for Linux. This has an advantage for Linux newcomers as they can set up their hard disk ready for the Linux installation from within Windows and with less risk of costly mistakes. It cannot create partitions on dynamic disks, but as these are only used by Windows this is less of a drawback.

The basic tasks of creating and deleting partitions are easy enough to master, but they're nothing beyond what Windows can manage. Partition Commander really comes into its own with more advanced tasks, such as moving or copying partitions. Partitions can also be merged; it's not unusual to decide all too late that separating files was an inefficient use of disk space.

Anyone who is planning to upgrade their hard disk will find the copy partition utility very useful. Moving a 20GB Windows partition onto a new 80GB disk only took about 20 minutes without a restart required. Once the copy was finished, the new disk booted perfectly.

The Volume Explorer shows the contents of a partition and is a useful way to double-check which partition is which if there is any doubt.

Finally, the Partition Commander CD is bootable and can be used to rescue disks when they go badly wrong, a vital aspect to any partitioning utility.

This is not a utility that will be used every day, but those times it is used it will more than justify its cost. The copy partition feature alone makes it a must-have when upgrading a main boot disk.

Also consider:
Paragon Drive Copy 8 Professional
Powerful yet easy to use tool to migrate data between disks

Norton Save & Restore
A simple way to protect your valuable files

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