HOW MANY TIMES have you wanted to save more files to your E: drive and reduce the space allocated to your C: or D: drive? When you click on "My Computer" on the Windows desktop, the "drives" that you see such as C:, D:, and E: are all usually "partitions" of a single larger hard disk. By itself, Windows offers very little in the way of safe partition management with out losing data, so people use applications made especially for this purpose. This is where Easeus steps in with its Partition Manager Business Edition, currently standing at version 1.6.4. It features an easy to use interface. After all, you don't really dabble with partitioning every day, you just use it when you need to. Easeus Partition Manager helps you with partition tasks such as creating, deleting, resizing, moving, hiding, and setting-active specified partitions.



Its task-based interface lets you visualize a "map" of your hard disk, showing you which partition is positioned where. For instance, let's imagine this situation. Your C: drive is sized at 20 GB, there is a D: drive of 40 GB placed next to it, and then an E: drive of SO GB at the end of the drive map. You want to delete every- thing on drive E: and use that space for your C: drive instead, so here's what you'd do. First delete the partition named E:, then move the partition named to the end of the drive map, which leaves behind SO GB of unallocated space in the middle of the map. Then resize C: so that it fills out the unallocated space, and apply the changes. Why do you need to "apply" the changes? That's because when you make changes to the drive map, Partition Manager holds these changes in abeyance, so that you can undo any accidental damaging changes. But once you apply the actions you had lined up, you cannot revert back to how it was.

There are many other operations you can carry out on your partitions. You can even set a password so that you don't accidentally make changes that you didn't intend to. Partition Manager supports FAT, FAT32, and NTFS file systems on all consumer-level internal and removable types of storage devices. Easeus also claims support of higher-end storage hardware such as RAID, SCSI, and Firewire drives. Currently, it does not support hard disks over 800 GB in capacity, dynamic disks, or a system with over 32installed disks. The Business Edition is licensed for use on a single physical machine and will install and work on desktop versions of Windows (eg: Windows 2000 and XP). This full product worth Rs. 1,800 is provided free on the DVD for PC World readers.