Customer Reviews

V-Com System Commander 7.0

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Despite the fact that I have been up to my navel in PC technology for many years, and have previously used several types of multi-OS multi-boot systems, and despite having seen this product on several systems along the way, I never used it until recently.

Oh the pain! Oh the suffering! Oh the sorrow!

I don't know how this product came to be number one in it's field, for it surely does it's job very badly.

It eventually does everything it claims to do. But before that happens, it makes you stand on your head atop a blue moose every Tuesday.

The user interface is very pretty and totally useless in terms of information given. If something doesn't boot correctly (almost sure to happen during setup) it only presents terse little mesages like "Error detected, process stopped" and absolutely nothing to give you a clue about what went wrong.

The built in "wizards" should be called "court jesters" instead. If something goes wrong in an install the "wizard" doesn't undo or leave a bookmark, but just leaves the mess on your drive for you to clean up manually. It never even tells you that it did that, and your fisrt indication is when after several retries, it tells you there isn't any space left on your drive.

If a 1000 monkeys typing for 1000 years will eventually produce a work of Shakespeare, it must have taken only 10 monkeys about 10 years to produce the manual for this product. Everything you need to know to make this product work is IN the manual, but it is so poorly organized, so horribly laid out, that you must read the manual from front to back and take your own notes before you can use this product with any comfort and attempt to debug any problems. No explaination of menu choices organized by menu, no explaination of utility options organized by utility, no explaination of errors indexed by error codes or types. The manual seems to be laid out as a brain dump, with items covered in the order that someone thought to include it.

Tech support at the V-Com web site is a joke, with "kiddie" FAQs covering the most elemental questions ("Can I use the Windows version on my Mac?" type stuff) and a truely meager symptom-fix database with a search engine that seems to have a vocabulary of less than 100 words (i.e., returns like "no hits found on the word "unix", please try again")

Bottom line - you can make this product do what it claims to do - which is why I give it a mighty two stars - but prepare for some loss of sleep and hair, and be double sure to have all your data backed up first, because you will surely lose some learning how this works.

I purchased System Commander 7 in hopes of studying (trying out) RedHat Linux 8 while running my normal WinXP. After the installation, the ride was a little bumpy; several restarts before the freezing stopped. After that, everything worked great for both RH8 and WinXP. Then I decided to run Norton Speed Disk on my WinXP partition (NTFS). After I finished, I rebooted and boom, the MBR was ruined. Apparently, Norton had moved a critical file belonging to SC7 and rendered my XP partition toast. I used the XP recovery utility with fixmbr and fixboot, but the partition would never boot again. I removed the partition, and made a new one... installing XP on top plus SC7. Now everything is working normal again. However, in the end I had data loss (most of what I recovered). Luckily, most of my files run off another independent drive.

All in all, I valued the chance to run Linux in dual boot with XP and just had to put up with the little quirks of SC7 that caused me problems. Number one rule, backup is HIGHLY recommended when using SC7 (and they are not kidding). :)

System Commander 7 is a very powerful product. It does what it says it can do. You should always have the correct version for the operating systems it says it supports. For people who have XP you should have the latest version 7.05. You either love it or you hate it simple as that.

I hit two nasty bugs quickly after installing and using this software: 1) the upgrade from a previous version (which was working fine) resulted in a machine that did not boot. 2) an attempt to resize a Linux partition failed for lack of memory on a machine that had almost 400MB of memory.

I don't think this release was tested very well!

I have tried similar products, but this one can handle any kind of setup, old or new - EIDE or SCSI drives - and more. It has very good documentation and is easy to use. I am running four O/Ss on my machine and the partition manager is very reliable and easy to understand. If you are a tinkerer, like I am, you will love this product.

I usually configure PCs with multi-OS for testing application code. Re-partioning and deinstalling/replacing OS just to meet the requirements of different applications can be a challenging task specially if all is done thru fdisk. I view System Commander 7 as an affordable product that includes both the OS Manager and Partitioning utility. Using this product is easy with the familiar "windows like" environment. The online help is useful and so does its hardcopy manual which explains technical aspects of SC7 and hard disk partitioning primer that even people who are not familiar on PC hardware are able to understand. Despite its user friendliness of the product one may encounter challenging situation during installation of an OS. One must be careful in doing OS upgrades which often after the installation the OS can be unstable due to the existing drivers and applications that may not be compatible with the upgraded OS. Although this is an OS issue it should be worth mentioning in their manuals what the user need to prepare before the upgrade. Also, after resizing partitions >8GB - accessing the OS and partitioning utility may not work sometimes; but this can be resolved thru its backup restart disk. Other than this few stumbling blocks the SC7 works well. And true to its word it works on most combination OS.

Nothing changed from the 2000 version but the XP support. the looks might be pritty but if you dont use XP, dont buy this thing.

Please, don't buy this if you want to add DOS to a computer with XP. I used their Partition tool to create free space for DOS. When I installed DOS through their OS wizard, it moved my XP partition and all of it's data. Now, XP doesn't fully boot up. I had to reformat my NTFS partition and reinstall XP. If I had known this, I wouldn't have bought the software. On Microsoft support website, they tell you how to install dos, then XP, and have it dual boot. So, save your money.

Having lost half of my hard drive, what can I say.....I'm now back to good ole ME and the heck with...an XP, ME combo....I only have 9. out of the 18.0 drive left so even if I'm to blame for half of it ,...this product is still ...not too easy to use......so, now what?

I have been using successive versions of System/Partition Commander with generally good success since version one point something. Version 7 is the only one I ever had any trouble with, but I think that is because I failed to follow some instructions. That is, I failed to uninstall System Commander before deleting the partition it was installed into, which left me with some problems in the boot manager section. I finally had to use the NT boot manager for part of the multi-boot process.

I am now moving to version 9, hoping that will work better for me than version 7 has. At least I will be meticulous this time in following good procedure. (And I need the Vista support.)

The problem is that Microsoft keeps making things more difficult, so V-Comm has to keep adding adjustments to keep up. I would still be using version 4, except that XP and Vista make demands which version 4 is not prepared to address.

Sometimes one could wish that the instructions were a bit less opaque. But if you are a careful reader and meticulous in your approach, you will get through the problems just fine. At least this program does what it is supposed to do. Once upon a time I bought Partition Magic in a pinch because I couldn't find System Commander when I needed it. It basically destroyed my system, and I had to buy System Commander and phone the SC tech guys to lead me through the recovery. Took them about 10 minutes over the phone to undo all the damage Partition Magic had done and to set my system up to run properly.

All told, I have to give the people at V-Comm very high marks for what they do. I've chopped one star from this because I think Version 7 is not quite up to the level of other versions--but it is still far better than anything else out there from any competitor.