This is a major competitor to the likes of Partition Magic, and we first reviewed it here. Its whole aim in life is to make partition management something anybody can do. If you have several partitions on your hard drive and want to change their relative sizes, why should you have to re-build your system from scratch?

You install Partition Commander 8 under Windows, but when you run it the system restarts and a dedicated Linux implementation runs with the actual application in a pseudo-Windows environment.

Here there are all the main functions you'd expect a partition manager to be able to handle, all wrapped up in a series of Wizards. You can use the Partition Wizard to resize existing partitions or build new ones and the BackStep Wizard to undo those changes you don't want to apply.

As you're working with your different partitions, a graphical display shows the way your drive is structured and how any changes will leave it looking. You don't have to implement any alterations until you can see what you'll be getting.

There are several extras supplied with the program, including System Commander, which is a boot manager enabling you to start up different operating systems, even within the same partition. There's also Copy Commander, which helps when migrating an image from one drive to another. This is a good solution when upgrading a hard drive.

The program can handle FAT32 and NTFS Windows partitions and is also good for ext2, ext3 and ReiserFS Linux partitions. With Windows 2000 and XP, you can also convert Dynamic drive partitions back into Basic ones, if you no longer need the extra facilities of the Dynamic formatting.

Although it can be a little unnerving to move from the security of a Windows environment, the look-alike quality of the specialist environment VCom has created soon makes you feel at home and the power and clarity of the utilities in this package give it a firm thumbs up.