Here at Corpmac we’re fans of virtualisation - both Parallels in particular is in pretty much daily use. However, there are times where nothing other than Boot Camp will do the trick - so we also have a slice of hard disk dedicated to a Boot Camp partition.

Trouble is, its size was a bit of a guess. And, it turns out, quite a bit too large. Getting that wasted disk space back to the main Mac partition isn’t something that can be done with Boot Camp Assistant - well, not unless you want to do a complete backup / resize / restore. Not a pleasant task.

So, we’re glad to find out about CampTune from Paragon Software. This is a bootable CD that enables you to safely resize partitions, automatically dealing with any data that needs moved to cope with the resizing.

We’ve given this a work-out here - eventually settling on reclaiming the 7Gb we had over-allocated to out Boot Camp partition. CampTune performed perfectly each time, taking around an hour to move data and resize the partitions. The only small niggle we’d have is that once it’s finished, and you press OK, it just leaves you sitting at a final screen. All you need to do (and indeed can do) at this point is reboot, but it’d be good to have at least a message on screen telling you to do this.

So definitely recommended if you want to resize your Boot Camp partition. CampTune does exactly that with no fuss or drama.

CampTune is in pre-release at the moment, and is currently available for free.

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CampTune, partition, Boot Camp

Posted: August 10th, 2008 under Review, Stuff We Use.
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This is what Apple should have released in the first place - this bugfix release of the iPhone’s OS fixes at least two of the three problems I mentioned in my initial post of my impressions last month.

The obvious feeling with this release is that it’s much snappier. Gone are the delays in the Address Book application, and I’ve been pushing Location Services quite hard to see if I could stall the phone again, with no luck. Also fixed are some other niggles that I came up against - Apple seemingly had broken Time Zone support again, which of course I only found out about when I was 8 timezones away from home.

Apple, of course, have not released a full list of fixed bugs, so I can’t tell you exactly what it fixes. But it’s certainly worth a go to see if it improves whatever small thing was bugging you about your iPhone.

Posted: August 5th, 2008 under News.
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