This is probably the best-known drive installation and upgrade manager in the world and Ontrack claims over 150 million copies have been sold. Rather than working with existing drives in a PC, it aims to provide painless installation of a primary or secondary hard drive, by providing all the information needed and automating the configuration process.

The main screen of Disk Manager 5 offers several options, but the main application is the installation tutorial. Here you select the drive you want to add to your PC and you can view or print out a checklist showing exactly what you need to do to install the drive, set up its jumpers and install an operating system.

What Disk Manager 5 does, it does extremely well, but it's of much more use to PC builders or repairers than to the general user. It provides up-to-date information on a huge range of hard drives, including IDE, serial ATA and SCSI devices. This makes initial installation a very simple process, without the need to look up jumper settings and specifications in numerous technical manuals.

The information doesn't end there, though, as the program can create a Data Adviser diskette, which will boot from cold and display detailed information on the status of your PC's memory and, particularly, its hard drives. This is a really useful diagnostic tool which completes surface scans and a file structure analysis; ideal if your job involves sorting out sick PCs. Again, though, it's a program you're only likely to use when something goes wrong.

Disk Manager 5 can't re-partition an active drive and includes no facilities for restructuring a drive without wiping its contents. You've really got be configuring a lot of PCs for its undoubted time-savings to make it a worthwhile purchase.