Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2010 Suite

Paragon’s disk utilities are designed to help keep your computer’s hard disk in shape.

The 2010 version of Paragon’s Hard Disk Manager Suite is a collection of those tools that can tackle a lot of the fiddly little jobs that occasionally need to be done on a computer, and it can take care of some day-to-day housekeeping too.

There are two ways of working with the program: you can choose from a list of step-by-step wizards (a setting that Paragon calls Express Mode) or you can go for the full-screen view, which is comprehensive but may be a bit overwhelming for people unused to the software.

The wizards cover five different types of task: partitioning, backup and recovery, copying, security and optimization, and boot management. A partition is a subdivision of a physical hard disk into two or more ‘logical’ disks, so you can have, say, disks C, D and E on one hard disk.

Hard Disk Manager Suite lets users create, merge and delete partitions and while it includes some useful features, a few of the basic ones are covered by the partitioning tool that comes with Windows.

Backing up your disks protects against drive failure or virus attack. The program can save and restore individual files, complete folders or a whole partition or disk. Similar techniques are used to copy the contents of a complete disk to another device, making PC upgrades much easier.

When your computer comes to the end of its life, before you sell it or give it away, it’s worth wiping the hard disk to make sure all the sensitive data has been properly removed. A secure wiping utility is included for this, along with another one for defragmenting the disk, which should speed up general running.

Other programs defragment the disk in the background so you can keep working but Hard Disk Manager Suite needs to restart the computer. Although this version of Hard Disk Manager has been optimised to work with Windows 7, that operating system has a vastly improved defragmenter, so the one here is less useful.

There are some useful tools here but they don’t always add more than what Windows includes already (some of the partitioning and defragmenting features are covered by Windows). The backup features are useful, however.

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