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Cool Stuff About Business and Entertainment in the Greater Harrisburg, PA Area. |
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Cool Stuff About Business and Entertainment in the Greater Harrisburg, PA Area. |
Partition Magic 3.0 Does your big, new hard drive suddenly
seem too full, too soon? Use Partition Magic v.3.0 to simply and safely repartition your hard disk for storage efficiency and optimal speed. It was not too long ago when hard drives were 80MB and then grew to the monstrous size of 200MB. When drives were this size and partitions, under DOS v.3.3 could not exceed 32MB not much thought was given to disk cluster sizes and space wasted by them. Today’s new PCs often come with a drive measuring 1GB or larger. Cluster sizes vary in a linear fashion dependent upon the size of the partition on a hard drive. Typical cluster sizes for a DOS formatted hard drive are 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K and 32K for drive partitions of less than 127MB, 128MB-255MB, 256MB-511MB, 512MB-1023MB, 1024MB-2047MB respectively. The DOS FAT file limits each cluster on your hard disk to contain one and only one file reference.. What this means to you is, a simple 1K batch file will waste, not use, a minimum of 1K to a maximum of 31K of disk space dependent upon the cluster size in use for the partition the file is stored in. You will probably lose somewhere between 10-40% of your hard drive’s usable space if its partition/cluster size is 8K, 16K or 32K in size. Before there was PartitionMagic the only way to change the cluster size was to reformat your hard drive. This time consuming process necessitated backing up the drive and then reformatting it using the DOS FDISK utility program and then restoring all your files. This is not a speedy processor for those with a timid heart, which is most of us. PartitionMagic allows, even the most novice user, to create a new, change or even hide an existing partition’s characteristics by merely pointing, clicking and dragging drive dimension indicators within the programs graphical display. Version 3.0 represents the first time licensed third party software has been bundled into this already robust, easy to use program. Applications Mover from MicroHelp’s Uninstaller is now included and may be used to easily moving entire applications to a new location/partition and their operating system references/pointers. Partition Copy is new and lets the user copy entire partitions to a new hard drive, using caution as to decide whether to use Applications Mover for system reference adjustments for program operation/integrity. IBM’s Boot Manager makes taking advantage of having multiple operating systems (e.g. DOS, Windows 95, Windows NT or IBM OS/2) on your PC a matter of making a simple selection at system boot-up time. Installation We installed the program from a CD-ROM version. The installation was almost faster than you can "change that partition size to give me more drive space and improved security". It is important to note that the program can be run from any partition except the one being modified. It may be run from a floppy drive, disk included with CD-ROM version. Installation is extremely easy and straightforward, all you have to do is pick the hard drive(s) partition on which you want to install the program. Usage and observations This is one of those rare programs that works right out of the box, as advertised without any unusual or special/unique occurrence problems we so often run into. It worked the first time, every time and never caused a problem. We used on a new high tech file server with multiple hard drives (SCSI and EIDE), file structures and hard drives, an Intel Pentium 133 processor powered notebook with 24MB RAM and an "old boat anchor XT" with DOS 5.0 and a 40MB hard drive which was Stacker compressed. We were able to:
The manual is simple to understand; yet thorough and well worth the time to read if for no other reason than to learn how hard disks are physically configured. The illustrative examples will take even the most novice user through the above referenced actions with an ease and aplomb that will make him/her feel like a real hardware expert. The help desk at PowerQuest is readily accessible with little if any wait and you will find a competent, capable person at the other end of the phone that can answer all your questions while allaying any fears you may have! If you have a new system using the FAT32 files system and a hard drive larger than 2 GB a word of caution before installing DOS, Windows 3.x and/or Windows NT. Do not create free space at the end of the drive, hide the existing FAT32 partition and install DOS. It will work but be prepared for problems. DOS will not recognize drives larger than 2 GB. We found DOS would install but not run after the system was restarted; it would run from a DOS boot disk but this is not the optimal solution. We recommend creating free space at the end of the drive and then moving the Fat 32 partition to the end of the drive, hiding it and then install DOS, then Windows NT.
Conclusions PartitionMagic is the best way for you to tune up your hard drive for maximum speed and efficiency. If you have a system with a large drive and one partition it is like increasing the size by 20%-40% for free when you create a new partition(s). The resultant cost of this new/reclaimed/resized cluster space can be as little as 11-12 ¢/MB. This program is worthy of consideration/purchase by anyone with a hard drive having partitions of 512MB or more. As drives continue to get larger the advisability of purchasing this excellent program will only increase. The new additions to the program, although not necessary for the basic operation of the program, are a very welcome addition and serve to make an already product superior to its competition. If you are only going to buy one utility program for your PC this year, give this program worthy consideration. MRSP: $69.95; upgrade, from 1.0 or 2.0 $29.95 PowerQuest Corporation Phone: 800.379.2566 Web site: http://www.powerquest.com |
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