PARTITIONING

The failure of Avanquest's Partition Commander is also not a surprise, as the software is just a visually revised version of Paragon's Partition Manager 8.5, and its compatibility problems with Vista are not new. What astonished us here was that Paragon apparently could not entirely rid itself of its incompatibility with Vista in version 9. During the first test while moving a data partition, P~ragon damaged it to such an extent that the system would not start. It was only after repairing the MBR using the Test Disk freeware that Vista could boot correctly. On the other hand, using Acronis Disk Director 10, didn't affect our system adversely. Thus you can use the partitions without hesitation only if you have XP. All of them have a similar functional scope and vary marginally even in case of complex partitioning jobs. The only exception is Disk Director which also divides a partition while all others can only unite them.

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Except for Partition Commander, every other partition tool comes with a boot manager. So, those who wish to install both XP and Vista can use those products. However, when we tried this feature out we discovered that eventually, XP doesn't detect Vista and overwrites its MBR. Furthermore, no boot manager supports Vista, so you can't use it as your primary system. It's a sad fact that though it's been almost two years since Vista has been introduced, there are still many programs out there that can't work with it.

Verdict

All hard disk system suites did quite a good job. For users this means that backing up Windows in the background is no longer a fantasy. However, the title of best performer had to go to a Vista-compatible partition manager-Acronis, which truly
is a complete care package for the hard disk. Even special functions, for instance, the one-click backup of the entire system as well as the sample mode for system changes ensures additional security.