Deluxe System Commander 4.000 (1998-05-01)

Company: V Communications Inc.,
2290 N 1st St Suite 101
San Jose, CA 95131
http://www.v-com.com

Price: $70 new / $30 upgrade

Reviewer: Bernhard Krevet (5/98)

Evaluation Ratings (5 * best)
Overall: ****
Installation: ***
Documentation: ****
Support: *****
Ease-of-Use: ***

"New operating system? Now there's nothing to fear. With new DELUXE SYSTEM COMMANDER (R), you can still get your work done while you sort out the kinks in your new operating system."

With this introduction from a flyer by the makers of System Commander, you know why you bought the product in the first place. While new releases of DOS might not frighten you any more, upgrading Win95 to Win98 (when it comes) might do so. Or you are just testing a new release and don't want to mess up your current environment. And if you feel that there is not enough competition in the PC operating system market, how about trying something entirely different, like OS/2 WARP, Be OS, any variety of Unix, Linux...?

Well, with System Commander this should be a breeze. All you need is enough space on your hard drive(s) for a new operating system - and a backup of your critical files (just to be safe, my advice!) Of course, System Commander protects everything already on your computer, data, applications, your current OS. With it's OS Wizard (TM) it is easy to install a new operationg system.

Documenation

System Commander (SC) comes with a 166 pages manual that I found well structured and quite conclusive. It takes you from its own installation process to the basics of hard drive partitioning and nomenclature. An overview of typical OS installations is followed by detailed operations, trouble shooting and recovery techniques and a FAQ section. There is an additional OS Wizard (TM) QuickGuide. It is time well spent to at least familarize yourself with the manual.

Installation

System Commander (SC) installs on the first primary partition (must be FAT) as a DOS application. Simply run SETUP of the first (of two) diskettes or boot your PC from this diskette. In either case, SC saves your current system configurations like CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, BOOT.INI, etc. on the diskette, installs itself (usually in C:\SC) and creates a new boot record. It then analyses your system for possible other installed OSes. After the next reboot, SC will present you with a menu of Operating systems. At this time, you may want to change the order in the menu, assign a time-out to start the default or last booted partition, and others. This requires some twiddling among a number of submenus.

Adding a new OS

This is where SC really shows its talent! By pressing Alt-O on the menu, you will get a menu with three choices: (1) new installation, (2) reinstall OS, (3) install new OS on top of old OS. In the latter case, SC will actually create a duplicate of your current OS in a seperate partition before installing the new OS.

Experience/Comments

On my PC, I already had four OSes installed: (1) plain DOS 7.0 in a primary partition, (2) Windows 3.1 in another primary partition, (3) OS/2 Warp 3 and (4) OS/2 Warp 4 in logical partitions on the second hard drive. I used Partion Magic to create and manage partitions and Boot Manager to select the OS of the week. The setup is somewhat complicated by the fact that each logical partion is associated with a different primary partition. My reason to test System Commander was to simplify the selection process by automatically hiding and unhiding any partitions that are needed for the particular OS. Unfortunately, SC is not intended to do that. I had to de-activate Boot Manager (using FDISK) and set the first DOS partition active. During this process and following tests, I had several questions to the support staff at V Communications. I sent an email to support@v-com.com and got constructive answers within a business day. A maintenance release 4.01 is available on the internet which I downloaded and tested. In the end I was told that my special situation was recognized. While SC does not provide the hide/unhide capability at this time, I was promised to be kept up-to-date on any future developments.

Summary

System Commander provides an effective and simple process to install and manage multiple operating systems on Intel-based PCs. By duplicating an existing OS in a new partition, upgrading of an existing or migration to a new OS is safe, elegant and professional. The program installs easily and occupies very little system resources. The user manual is very well organized and comprehensive. While SC may not (yet) support special circumstances, the current functionality is up to par with competitive products. What impressed me most was V Communications excellent support by email, quick turn-around and professional information.