I have bought, paid for upgrades and reviewed the major partition
managers/dual boot programs out there and don't get me wrong; they are
excellent, even if I am a little light in my bank account. At one time
or another I have recommended them all and until I found BootIt I would
continue to do so. But I'm always looking for another alternative (the
upgrades for the others were killing me!)
But then I ran into BootIt which is not only very reasonably priced, but
is an excellent bit of software. Every bit as good, or better, than
anything else I've used.
First there's the boot feature. It may not be something that you'll ever
use, but if you're curious about another operating system but you're not
ready to take the total commitment it pays off in spades. Installing a
new OS and then selecting which OS to boot to couldn't be easier.
For me the real gem was the partition management. If you go with the
standard Windows method you know that a change in partition size is a
major event and is destructive to any data. That means lots of backups,
playing with fdisk until your fingers bleed and, if you hold your tongue
just right, you end up with what you want.
BootIt solves that problems and a lot more. Here's the primary control
panel for maintenance.
Click on image to enlarge.
Let me recount how I used this. I wanted to install Win XP on an old Win
98 machine. I wanted to migrate my apps to Win XP but I had very, very
little room left on drive C: (my partitions were small to begin with). I
finally cleaned up enough space to get XP installed. I installed XP SP1
and ended up with a whopping 5Mb of free space (ouch!).
I installed BootIt and found that my mouse didn't work (it doesn't use
the Windows GUI). Not to worry, keyboard navigation was a snap.
From there is was a walk in the park. I took space from the other
partitions, used the "slide" feature to move it around and allocated it
to drive C:. and ended up with a 4Mb partition. I was good to go.
Initially I didn't check to see what kind of documentation came with
BootIt, I've gotten lazy and relied on the programs help system but I
should have checked out the bootit.pdf file, it is far better than the
help system and has a lot of details about options you'll want to know
about, including a solution to my mouse problem. So do as I say, not as
I do and check out the documentation. It's well done and reading it will
yield plenty of benefit.
I'm tremendiously impressed, well worth checking out and very highly
recommended.
