Description:
It was back in 1995 that PartitionMagic first appeared on the scene, at a time when the idea of partitioning a hard drive into several logical drives was only of interest to IT professionals. Much has changed since then, and with hard drives reaching ever-increasing proportions, the use of partitions makes sense for all but the complete novice PC user. However, it's not just for organization of drive space that PartitionMagic is useful. Having separate partitions for backups, or for running multiple operating systems on a single machine, is a good idea, if not essential, and PartitionMagic is an ideal tool for assisting you in these tasks. All the necessary tools are present, as they were in previous incarnations, including BootMagic, which allows you to manage multiple operating systems and create and resize partitions without destroying data. However, a number of useful additions have found their way into this new release. Most noticeable amongst them is support for both Windows Me and Windows 2000. The interface has been cleaned up and is now more intuitive, incorporating an Explorer-style tree view of partitions. A new wizard makes it simple to copy partitions, and you now have the ability to split FAT and FAT32 partitions. You can even undelete partitions, provided that the previously allocated space hasn't been overwritten. PartitionMagic 6.0 focuses tightly on managing just a single aspect of your computing needs, but it undertakes the task with such aplomb that it's hard not to recommend. --Jason Weston
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