There's a golden rule of reviewing system utilities that states something along the lines of ‘thou must not install review software on a machine you need to use the following day.'

You can see what's going to happen, right?

Paragon's Hard Disk Manager 2008 is a suite of tools designed to cover the key bases of hard disk maintenance: there's a defragmentation utility, a disposal tool that wipes a drive clean, partitioning software, cloning and recovery utilities and boot management, with a few extra bits and bobs on top.

The installation is relatively straightforward, save for the requirement to enter two elongated code numbers before it'll let you do so. And when you load up the program for the first time, you hit a clear and straightforward menu of tools. We fired this up first and foremost on our laptop, where a cluttered hard disk had been causing us a few problems. We started by looking at the boot management tool.

And three hours later, we were ready to resume testing.

The boot management tool, once in place, refused to spot the main Vista partition on our hard drive, and thus wouldn't boot. If we booted straight to CD and loaded up the Hard Disk Manager from there, we could find a way in, but this slowed down the workings of the computer enormously.

It took some time to undo the problems that the boot manager caused, and even after a supposedly full uninstallation, there are still signs of it on the test laptop. It perhaps goes without saying that that side of things impressed us not a jot.

Fortunately, the remaining tools, once we'd loaded Hard Disk Manager 2008 up on a testbed desktop (lesson firmly learned!), worked a lot more successfully. The defragmentation tool, while not on the same keel as Diskeeper, did its work ably and effectively enough, while the backup utility - replete with some quite effective and scalable compression - produced impressive results.

The disk partitioning too was fuss-free, which made us wonder why the boot manager itself was so problematic. Because assessing the main suite of utilities with the boot manager put to one side, Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2008 is a useful and welcome collection of tools.

But we dread to think how a novice user would feel, confronted with a machine that didn't boot, and an application that wouldn't install without having to mess around with the master boot record. Maybe we were just unlucky with our test machine, but our advice? By all means warm to the rest of the Hard Disk Manager suite, as we did, but leave the boot manager well alone.

A good value suite of hard disk tools that cover the key bases you'd hope for. The boot manager, however, significantly lets the side down.