Easeus Partition Manager Professional Edition 2.1

Note: Pricing for this product is in US$.

Easus Partition Manager is a disk utility designed to allow you to create and resize disk partitions with ease. Like Paragon's Partition Manager, it also comes in three versions — in this case Home as well as Professional and Server editions.

Easeus Parttion Manager Professional supports 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista (as well as 32-bit Windows 2000), and is about half the price of the Pro release of Paragon's Partition Manager — although with fewer features overall.

While the interface is generally easy enough to use when creating, moving and deleting partitions, it is not as slick as its competitor and lacks the simpler screen that Paragon provides. As such, novices might be slightly confused by the information first presented to them, but the use of wizards to work with partitions should help the process.

Aside from the partition manager itself, the only additional utility offered by Easus Partition Manager Professional is one to create a boot disc in case you need to recover your system. Nonetheless, it handles the core task very well and creating, moving and labelling partitions proved to be simple and efficient, without any loss of data.

All actions can be previewed before you commit to them, and the program supports hard disks up to 1TB in size as well as RAID arrays of multiple disks.

The apparent lack of features and the somewhat cruder interface count against Easus — but these are the only two things. And the Home version of Easeus Partition Manager is free for personal, non-commercial use, although it only supports 32-bit OSes. Like the Professional version, the Home version works with RAID setups and, if you wish to create, move and resize partitions this is an extremely useful utility.

At the other end of the scale, the Server edition supports Windows Server (2000 and 2003 editions) and handles up to 32 hard drives. This is the most powerful version, which in turn is available at half the price of Paragon's server offering, and for the same price as its competitor you can run it on an unlimited number of computers with Vista and XP.