I’ve never enjoyed the prospect of editing the partitions on my PC; my data’s too precious and I’m a computing malfunction magnet! So I was naturally cautious when I downloaded EASEUS Partition Master to review, which is available as a free download from EASEUS’ site. I’m always slightly wary about editing/creating/deleting partitions, but Partition Master gave a good impression from the offset, in fact it works better than a lot of paid solutions I’ve come across.
Partition Master does everything you’d expect from such a piece of software — you can manage partitions on internal and external drives (both USB and Firewire) and even copy entire partitions and disks, which makes a very nice feature list for a free piece of software. The user interface is extremely simple to navigate for both beginners and professionals whilst still offering more than enough features to keep even the most demanding consumer happy (although no one can complain at the price).
When you first open Partition Master, you’re presented with a list of all your drives and their partitions. You’ll find a list of partition operations on a sidebar to the left, and to avoid any confusion the features that aren’t available on the selected drive are greyed out. This is a good feature for those who may not have experimented with altering or creating partitions before, so there’s less chance of going wrong and finding your beloved machine rendered useless and your data disappearing into a virtual black hole somewhere… You’ll find the main features along the top of the window in an easy to view format. The way this program’s laid out almost makes it too easy not to f*ck your hard drive up… When I was using it, I found myself thinking ‘this shouldn’t be so simple’ although you should still exercise caution, as always when using such programs.
I conducted my tests on two PC’s, an older laptop running Windows XP and a newer desktop machine running Windows 7. Putting Partition Master to use was pretty simple — I selected the drive which I wanted to edit which enabled the host of buttons at the top of the window which were previously greyed out. I was surprised at how straight forward the partition editing process was when I was adjusting the size of my partitions with a rather intuitive slide bar. The various volumes were extremely easy to resize and offered a good degree of accuracy too. Creating a partition is also simple, and you can select from a variety of formats.
In conclusion, I was very impressed with Partition Master although I must warn against misuse; however good the software may be, you need to make sure you’re editing the correct partitions before you click your PC into oblivion. Make sure you back up your data before you make major changes to your drive, which you can also do for free using EASEUS ToDo Backup software!
Although I’m still not 100% comfortable with playing around with my partitions and data, Partition Master has gone a long way towards easing my discomfort. If you do need a partition manager, I highly recommend EASEUS Partition Manager, which is available for Windows 2000 Professional, XP, Vista and 7 (32-bit operating systems only).
Hoping to study Computer Science at University in the near future, you’ll seldom see John without a computer in touching distance! His interests include building computers, reading all sorts of literature and of course writing for Zath to keep you updated on all the latest in the world of tech!
