Paragon Partition Manager Personal 9.0

Paragon Partition Manager has always been one of the leading lights in terms of hard disk management, and with software as comprehensive as Personal 9.0 it's easy to see why. For the paltry sum of £18 this utility offers complete control over every aspect of your data setup, and all from within Windows.

The main interface hasn't changed a great deal over the last few versions; it's still as dry and functional as ever. But there is a new Express Launcher front end, which is an improvement. For those not entirely comfortable with its array of potentially system-killing tasks, there are very clear wizards to walk you through everything. We toyed with our test hard disk in all sorts of ways: resizing it, splitting it, reformatting individual partitions - and it handled each with minimal input from the user.

You can boot from the DVD, too. This allows you to set up multiple boot systems, and it guides you through installing XP and Vista on the same disk. But even during simple tasks you'll become familiar with the boot program, as any changes to your OS hard disk will automatically be run in this mode. It's not great at predicting the duration of each task - one partitioning job successfully completed with a supposed 25 minutes remaining - but we were impressed with the speed of the program at work.

All this power could easily cause headaches, but the potential for user error is reduced by the fact that Partition Manager 9.0 makes all its changes in virtual mode. Nothing you do to your hard disks will actually become permanent, even after you reach the end of a wizard and click Finish. Only when you're absolutely comfortable do you click the Apply button on the main screen to finalise changes. This is an excellent double buffer against the sorts of rash decisions we're all capable of making.

New to version 9.0 is a simple backup wizard, allowing you to save your partition layout to an external disk before any critical alterations. You can also burn a recovery CD, which allows you to roll back unsuccessful partitioning tasks or restore entire disks. And with this version, Paragon has added support for 64-bit Vista.

Paragon Partition Manager Personal 9.0 is an inexpensive yet hugely powerful tool; much more powerful than the bundled facility provided with Acronis True Image 11, for instance. The interface could do with a bit of polish, but for just £18 it makes a great value addition to any software collection.

Author: David Bayon