>>>>
>>>>I've good experience with Acronis product.
>>>
>>>Thank you, Sergey. I just found out that System Commander won't work on 64 bit OS. So Acronis is the only choice I have.
>>
>>There's http://www.paragon-software.com/ but I didn't use it much.
>
>I looked at their web site and it seem that they support 64 bit OS Vista too. So it is between them and Acronis.
>
>Interesting that System Commander web site has a full list of features but never mentioned if they support 64 bit OS. Only when I called the company that sells SC and ask for tech support I found that they don't support 64 bit. And it seemed, from the conversation with the tech support guy, that they will not longer be doing future updates for SC.

One thing to be careful of is reducing the size of an existing partition. Suppose you have an existing machine with a 160GB hard drive, with the whole drive partitioned as a single volume (C:).

Only 20GB or so may actually be in use on Vista, so you say, OK, I'll repartition so I have an 80GB Vista64 volume and free up 80GB for something else. This means reducing the Vista volume from 160GB down to 80GB.

A lot of OSs don't like having their volume sizes reduced, especially the system volume. It basically means defragging so there are (hopefully) no files at the end of the volume, then reducing the volume size. In some cases defragging may not be able to move files from the end of the volume; if you reduce the volume size anyways, those files are lost and the OS system volume may be damaged or corrupted and may not even boot.

Increasing volume sizes is much easier/safer. If you're considering tools that claim to be able to "resize" volumes/partitions, make sure they can safely *reduce* the size of a volume, if that's what you need to do.

Bearing all the above in mind, a better solution may simply be to get a bigger hard drive. If you replace a 160GB drive with a 320 or 500GB unit, you can image copy the old 160GB volume to the new drive and you'll have lots of room left over for something else. The image copy will be exactly the same as it was on the old drive so Vista64 will have no reason to complain. You may even find that a new, bigger drive is cheaper than software you may be considering, and will likely be faster than your old drive, giving you a bonus speed boost.