Paragon Partition Manager 11 Professional [32-bit]

Paragon Partition Manager 11 Professional is an powerful tool that provides just about everything you need to set up and maintain your hard drive.

A lengthy list of partitioning tools gives you the ability to create, format, move, resize, merge, hide, unhide, delete and undelete partitions, for instance. And well-designed wizards are on hand to walk you through every step of the process, so you don't need to be a hard drive expert to get started. (Although of course some options, like formatting, are destructive, so it still pays to be careful.)

A simple backup tool can save a drive or individual partitions to other drives, CDs, DVDs or Blu-ray. And if there's a problem you don't have to restore the entire backup: it's possible to select just the files and folders you need.

Optimisation features include a defrag tool, which can optimise and compact system areas like the MFT (though you'll need to reboot). And new in this version is the Paragon Alignment Tool, which detects partitions with mismatched logical and physical sectors and then corrects the problem, potentially delivering a very noticeable speed boost.

Migration options allow you to copy your system to another hard drive, resizing the partitions appropriately if the destination is larger. Another new feature means you're able to copy your drive to a virtual drive, too (Virtual PC, Sun VirtualBox, VMware Workstation and Fusion formats are supported). And the program can also connect to a virtual drive, then treat it like any other, so for example you might be able to use the Paragon Alignment Tool to improve your virtual machine's performance.

You also get excellent disaster recovery tools, both Linux and Windows PE-based environments that could get an unbootable PC working again. Geeks will appreciate the many low-level tweaks on offer, like the ability to change a partition's cluster size, or edit it at the sector level. And you can be sure Paragon Partition Manager 11 Professional will deliver in just about every situation, because it supports all the main hard drive types (IDE, SATA, SCSI, iSCSI, RAID, external) and file systems: NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, Ext2FS, Ext3FS, Ext4FS, ReiserFS, LinuxSwap, HPFS and Apple HFS.

Excellent partitioning options, virtualisation support and disaster recovery features make Paragon Partition Manager 11 Professional a very useful tool for business and advanced home users