A modern PC will be supplied with a large hard drive, generally over 250GB in size and with Windows and other applications pre-installed. The hard drive is generally pre-configured either as one large partition or, more annoyingly, made up of a number of smaller partitions. There is no easy way of changing the size of these partitions from within Windows, using the supplied tools.

Paragon’s Partition Manager is hard drive partitioning software that will enable you to change the size of your internal hard drive or any drive connected to the computer.

Partitioning a hard drive enables files to be managed more effectively. For instance, a core partition could be used to host Windows and system files, whilst another partition could handle work and data files. It’s not a wise idea to use a partition to back up important data as it is all stored on the same hard drive. However, by partitioning your hard drive, backup tools such as Paragon Drive Backup 8 can be utilised to backup a partition, rather than the entire hard drive.

If you’ve often thought about installing another operating system on your computer, such as Ubuntu or another Linux distribution, a separate partition could be created to handle the Ubuntu installation so it is kept apart from your Windows system files.

Paragon Partition Manager isn’t just limited to partitioning your drive. There are tools for you to defragment and free up vital space on your drives. Partitions can be copied and merged and if you really want to get serious, Partition Manager can be used to format and wipe a drive partition.

Paragon Partition Manager 10 is the brand new edition that ships with support for Windows 7, support for GPT-formatted hard drives, an improved recovery media builder and much more.

Note this is the 64-bit edition. A standard 32-bit edition can be downloaded here.