dotTech

Registration and installation went fine. Just run Setup.exe and install the program; registration should be done automatically in the process.

EASEUS Partition Manager Professional Edition is a good partition manager that allows you to do the basics of parition management (resize, format, delete, etc.) but also adds in a few "bells and whistles" such as copy partition/disk and hide/unhide partition.

This is what EASEUS PM looks like:

The interface is nothing too flashy; it is simple and straightforward. If you select an existing partition, you can do all of the following:

The above screenshot is of the right click menu; however you can do the same tasks from the top and left menus.

"Copy" literally will copy your whole partition to an empty partition on your hard drive. "Label" just allows you to change the label/name of your partition. "Set Active" will set the partition to be the boot partition. "Check Partition" allows you to check for errors on the partition:

If you have unpartitioned/unallocated space on your hard disk, you can partition it and format it to FAT, FAT32 and NTFS formats. Just right click on some allocated space and click on "Create". A window will popup where you can name the partition, chose a letter, chose the file system and chose the partition size:

Keep in mind that whenever you do an action/task with EASEUS PM, for example format or delete a partition, the action is not done until you hit the "Apply" button:

How EASEUS PM works is that all actions are "recorded" in a "to-do" list. To actually do the actions in the "to-do" list you must click on "Apply". Clicking on "Apply" tells EASEUS PM that you really want to do everything on the "to-do" list and you did not, for example, tell EASEUS PM to delete your G:/ partition by accident. You can view your "to-do" list from "View" -> "Operations Pending":

All the actions you told EASEUS to take will be listed one after another.

Before you hit "Apply" and confirm you want to do all the tasks (you may have to reboot your computer to complete one or more task) be sure that you really want to do them all because once you do them they may not be undoable (such as delete a partition) - the "Undo" button will only remove actions from the "to-do" list.

In addition to all mentioned above, you can create a bootable disk with EASEUS PM; this bootable disk can be put on any normal CD. What happens is that EASEUS PM is literally put on the disk. So whenever you put in the CD and reboot your computer you can use EASEUS PM from the disk (your BIOS must support booting from CD; the newer computers will be able to do this automatically but the older computers may need their settings changed in the BIOS). The advantage of this feature is if you are unable to boot into your Windows for any reason, you can still manage your partitions; for example you could resize your defunct Windows partition to make room for a different OS.

Lastly, you can password protect EASEUS PM: go to "General" -> "Set Password".

Overall I give EASEUS PM a thumbs up because it is a good partition manager. However I cannot say it is anything "special" (hence the score of "7" in the "Arbitrary Equalizer" category). Sure it is better than Windows partition manager in Vista but for a commercial software it really is not that impressive:

• It only supports FAT, FAT32 and NTFS formats. For a person that only uses Windows this may be okay, but there are increasing numbers of people that are using Linux. Not supporting Linux partitions (ext2/3) is a big draw back.
• While you can "copy" a partition, there is no "image a partition" feature. For someone that needs to copy a partition and use it, this is a good feature. However for backing up, the "copy" feature is a bad choice. Copying a partition will technically back up the partition, yes, but using the "copy" feature as a backup is a colossal waste of space since it does a 1:1 copy. On the other hand, "imaging" (often referred to as "ghosting") a partition creates a copy of the partition but the copy is compressed, in a sense, so it takes up less space than a direct 1:1 copy.
• This may be more of a novelty feature than anything else but other commercial partition managers have it so EASEUS PM Pro should also: the ability to recover or undelete deleted partitions.
• There are quite a few tasks, such as resize partition, that require you to reboot everytime (regardless of which partition you are trying to resize) if you do them via EASEUS PM. Comparatively, the Windows partition manager and Paragon Hard Disk Manager can resize some partitions with no reboot required.

This review was conducted on a laptop running Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit. The specs of the laptop are as follows: 3GB of RAM, a Radeon HD 2600 512MB graphics card, and an Intel T8300 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo processor.

Update

A couple of people have asked if it is possible to merge two partitions together with EASEUS. Here is the answer:

No it does not seem like EASEUS can merge two partitions (at least I see no explicit option for it - maybe I missed it?). However, for sure Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.5 SE (see "Free Alternatives" below) can merge two partitions. To merge two partitions, just go to "Wizard" -> "Merge Partitions". Both partitions must be on the same drive, “next to each other” and be NTFS, FAT or FAT32.

If you are looking to merge two partition that are not on the same drive you can use Paragon to ghost the partitions and restore both of them onto the hard drive you want them both on then merge them (should work… in theory).