Partitioning your hard drive is a smart way to organise your data, cut file fragmentation, and make a real difference to your PCs performance. There are plenty of tools around to make this happen, though, from Windows’ rather basic offerings, to free Linux-based suites, and comprehensive commercial packages. Does O&O PartitionManager 3.0 Professional have what it takes to stand out from the crowd, then? We took a closer look.

If you’re familiar with other partitioning tools then, at first glance, PartitionManager Professional may seem a little short on extras. There’s no backup tool, or boot manager, for instance. You don’t get the low-level drive manipulation options you sometimes see elsewhere, like the ability to convert file systems, change a partition’s cluster size, or update the Master Boot Record. And while there is an option to defragment a partition, it’s easy to miss (you must choose to resize a partition, then click Optimize).

There’s a reason for this, though: PartitionManager Professional isn’t about frills that you may not need, and instead concentrates almost entirely on core partition-related features. The immediate payoff for this comes in its extremely easy-to-use interface. While other tools bury you in endless options and dialog boxes, you can do just about everything you need in PartitionManager Professional from one straightforward Actions pane, where helpful wizards quickly walk you through the task at hand.

Those tasks include all the partitioning options you’d expect. You can format a drive (NTFS or FAT32 file systems are supported), and create a new partition (primary, extended, or a logical drive). It’s then easy to move, shrink, or expand that partition. If you can’t shrink it as you’d like, then the program can defragment the partition for better results. And, of course, you can delete a partition and reallocate the space elsewhere.

There’s no annoying limit on the disk types supported, either – PartitionManager Professional works with all of them, including MBR, dynamic and GPT.

And there are some useful bonus features here. The display of S.M.A.R.T. data on disk surface errors can be a useful indicator of impending drive failure, for instance. You get an option to securely delete a partition, very useful if you’re planning to sell a drive and want to be sure that it contains no personal data. And, new to this version is the ability to convert from logical to primary partitions, and vice versa.

Perhaps the real star extra, though, is the recovery disc. This comes in the form of a 257MB ISO file, but once burned to CD you’ll have a bootable disc that you can launch if Windows won’t start. Other partitioning products typically offer a Linux-based disc, but this one uses Windows PE, so fire it up and you’ll feel immediately at home. It contains a copy of PartitionManager 3.0 Professional, so if the boot problem is partition-related then you can use that to try and fix things. But if your issues lie elsewhere, then there’s a System Restore Point manager, a file manager, and even copies of REGEDIT and Internet Explorer to help you find out more about the problem and get your PC working again.