Product Reviews

Partition Magic is a program that's designed to let you divide the space on your hard disk into sections, called partitions, each of which Windows treats as if it were a different hard disk. Although there are utilities in most versions of Windows that let you do this, they're often difficult to use, and wipe data as they reconfigure the partitions. Partition Magic, on the other hand, is disk management for dummies.

For the most part, I was really impressed by Partition Magic 8. The new look really is both more pleasing to the eye and easier to use. One of the best new features is the File Browser. Previously, if you had two partitions for two different operating systems it was very tricky to move files between them. You might resort to using a floppy, basically treating them like two different PCs. File Browser ends all this, letting

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you browse files and folders on all your partitions, even hidden ones, and copy from one partition to another.

Another useful enhanced feature is the option to adjust a partition's cluster size. Clusters are the basic storage unit of your hard drive. Once they have any data at all stored in them - even a tiny little bit - nothing else can be placed in them. Consequently, small clusters make for less space wastage. With Partition Magic 8 you can shrink the cluster size on all kinds of partitions, even Windows XP ones, something not previously possible.

New functions aren't the only thing this software has going for it, though. It also has a new XP-style look and lots of easy to use single task wizards that make even fairly complex jobs easy for the beginner.

The only slight disappointment was that the program couldn't read our test installation of SuSe Linux Professional 7.3. This appeared to use a file system supported by Partition Magic, but neither the File Browser nor PQ Boot could see it properly. On closer investigation, it turned out that the file system wasn't what it appeared to be and wasn't supported after all. Not tragic, but worth bearing in mind if you're a Linux-lover.

If you have version 7 of Partition Magic, there are few reasons to upgrade. But Partition Magic remains a great utility, and far from getting more complex, this edition is better than ever for beginners. Recommended.