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V-Com System Commander 7.0

V-Com System Commander 7.0

List Price: $69.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: What a disappointment - still, it works, mostly
Review: Despite the fact that I have been up to my navel in PC technology for many years, and have previously used several types of multi-OS multi-boot systems, and despite having seen this product on several systems along the way, I never used it until recently.

Oh the pain! Oh the suffering! Oh the sorrow!

I don't know how this product came to be number one in it's field, for it surely does it's job very badly.

It eventually does everything it claims to do. But before that happens, it makes you stand on your head atop a blue moose every Tuesday.

The user interface is very pretty and totally useless in terms of information given. If something doesn't boot correctly (almost sure to happen during setup) it only presents terse little mesages like "Error detected, process stopped" and absolutely nothing to give you a clue about what went wrong.

The built in "wizards" should be called "court jesters" instead. If something goes wrong in an install the "wizard" doesn't undo or leave a bookmark, but just leaves the mess on your drive for you to clean up manually. It never even tells you that it did that, and your fisrt indication is when after several retries, it tells you there isn't any space left on your drive.

If a 1000 monkeys typing for 1000 years will eventually produce a work of Shakespeare, it must have taken only 10 monkeys about 10 years to produce the manual for this product. Everything you need to know to make this product work is IN the manual, but it is so poorly organized, so horribly laid out, that you must read the manual from front to back and take your own notes before you can use this product with any comfort and attempt to debug any problems. No explaination of menu choices organized by menu, no explaination of utility options organized by utility, no explaination of errors indexed by error codes or types. The manual seems to be laid out as a brain dump, with items covered in the order that someone thought to include it.

Tech support at the V-Com web site is a joke, with "kiddie" FAQs covering the most elemental questions ("Can I use the Windows version on my Mac?" type stuff) and a truely meager symptom-fix database with a search engine that seems to have a vocabulary of less than 100 words (i.e., returns like "no hits found on the word "unix", please try again")

Bottom line - you can make this product do what it claims to do - which is why I give it a mighty two stars - but prepare for some loss of sleep and hair, and be double sure to have all your data backed up first, because you will surely lose some learning how this works.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: not too good!
Review: Having lost half of my hard drive, what can I say.....I'm now back to good ole ME and the heck with...an XP, ME combo....I only have 9. out of the 18.0 drive left so even if I'm to blame for half of it ,...this product is still ...not too easy to use......so, now what?

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Problem with Windows XP at least and NTFS conversion
Review: I bought it and used it will a dell laptop and everytime I used the convert NTFS to Fat utility in the partition menu it disabled the whold system commander installation and I had to reformat the hard disk with NT to even reinstall system commander.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: THIS WILL SCREW UP YOUR COMPUTER
Review: I got this program, having more than 30 gig free on my hard drive. I tried to partition a part of it to add another OS, and it had an error in the middle of it, and now even my original OS will not work. THIS PRODUCT IS CRAP. Anyone thinking of purchasing it...think again, and be prepared for a migrane.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This is great!
Review: I have tried similar products, but this one can handle any kind of setup, old or new - EIDE or SCSI drives - and more. It has very good documentation and is easy to use. I am running four O/Ss on my machine and the partition manager is very reliable and easy to understand. If you are a tinkerer, like I am, you will love this product.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: This is great!
Review: I have tried similar products, but this one can handle any kind of setup, old or new - EIDE or SCSI drives - and more. It has very good documentation and is easy to use. I am running four O/Ss on my machine and the partition manager is very reliable and easy to understand. If you are a tinkerer, like I am, you will love this product.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: shipping beta code?
Review: I hit two nasty bugs quickly after installing and using this software: 1) the upgrade from a previous version (which was working fine) resulted in a machine that did not boot. 2) an attempt to resize a Linux partition failed for lack of memory on a machine that had almost 400MB of memory.

I don't think this release was tested very well!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: It is cheap, but you get what you pay for.
Review: I purchased disk commander to be installed on my Windows XP machines with NTFS partitions. The software immediatly will hide any non-booting partitions from Windows, that are not recoverabe via Windows XP.

Thus I lost a drive and all its data. Luckily, I had made boot disk number 2 and was able to get it back. Note, during this process, I ran out and bought Partition Magic that doesnt have these hokie issues.

ANyway, getting the drive back was not as easy as this sounds, since the software didnt tell me it was hiding a partition, it took me a day or so of panic to figure out what the software did.

I dont recommend this to anyone that are using Multiple NTFS partitions. In fact, I have 'circular filed' this app and now use partition magic.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: It's good, but it needs work...
Review: I purchased System Commander 7 in hopes of studying (trying out) RedHat Linux 8 while running my normal WinXP. After the installation, the ride was a little bumpy; several restarts before the freezing stopped. After that, everything worked great for both RH8 and WinXP. Then I decided to run Norton Speed Disk on my WinXP partition (NTFS). After I finished, I rebooted and boom, the MBR was ruined. Apparently, Norton had moved a critical file belonging to SC7 and rendered my XP partition toast. I used the XP recovery utility with fixmbr and fixboot, but the partition would never boot again. I removed the partition, and made a new one... installing XP on top plus SC7. Now everything is working normal again. However, in the end I had data loss (most of what I recovered). Luckily, most of my files run off another independent drive.

All in all, I valued the chance to run Linux in dual boot with XP and just had to put up with the little quirks of SC7 that caused me problems. Number one rule, backup is HIGHLY recommended when using SC7 (and they are not kidding). :)

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: It's good, but it needs work...
Review: I purchased System Commander 7 in hopes of studying (trying out) RedHat Linux 8 while running my normal WinXP. After the installation, the ride was a little bumpy; several restarts before the freezing stopped. After that, everything worked great for both RH8 and WinXP. Then I decided to run Norton Speed Disk on my WinXP partition (NTFS). After I finished, I rebooted and boom, the MBR was ruined. Apparently, Norton had moved a critical file belonging to SC7 and rendered my XP partition toast. I used the XP recovery utility with fixmbr and fixboot, but the partition would never boot again. I removed the partition, and made a new one... installing XP on top plus SC7. Now everything is working normal again. However, in the end I had data loss (most of what I recovered). Luckily, most of my files run off another independent drive.

All in all, I valued the chance to run Linux in dual boot with XP and just had to put up with the little quirks of SC7 that caused me problems. Number one rule, backup is HIGHLY recommended when using SC7 (and they are not kidding). :)


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