EasyBCD 2.1 and Some Big Changes

For all our loving users, readers, and members out there, EasyBCD 2.1 has just been released and is ready for consumption. Freshly baked, tenderly prepared, and lovingly made, it brings the usual host of new features and updates that a new version of EasyBCD usually brings.

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But this build of EasyBCD is a little special — we focused a lot more on improving the user experience over adding new features. We’ve fine-tuned every line of text, every button, every icon. We’ve hidden all we can hide, automated all we can automate, but never at the cost of advanced options; instead, everything is just that much smarter and more intelligent, cutting out the extra steps that left room for confusion. Simply put, EasyBCD 2.1 is all about smoothing out the edges of what has become the world’s most popular bootloader utility.

With EasyBCD 2.1 also comes some exciting changes from the developmental side of things. As you all may or may not know, development at NeoSmart Technologies has largely been a one-man show, with Mahmoud doing the coding and research, with help from an amazing team of moderators (chief of which are Terry, Justin, and Peter) providing most of the ever-important tech suport on our forums. What most people don’t know is that while NeoSmart Technologies has, alhamdulilah, reached epic heights over the past few years, it’s being run entirely on a part-time basis by all of its volunteers.

As a result of this, development has never been as fast-paced as our users would like and the documentation has somewhat stagnated over the years. We have always had some exciting ideas we wanted to try out, new projects we’d like to share, and guides we’d love to write, but unfortunately as hard-pressed for time as we were, these things just never happened. But we’d like that to change, and we’ll soon have people working full-time on NeoSmart projects.

This, combined with what some in the industry have taken to calling the “divide-by-zero” error: a lot of people from big corporations to individual users want to use free software, but have this terrible misconception that because it’s free it must be inferior, which as we all know, is simply not the case. There are also other issues involving EasyBCD and commercial use — it turns out that while we were publishing EasyBCD under a catch-all free license, some of the components we included in EasyBCD could only be redistributed for personal, non-commercial use; thus putting us and our users in a small dilemma.

The solution that we arrived at after much deliberation was to start a commercial licensing program for EasyBCD. Now, we need to say loud and clear: EasyBCD has always been and will always be free for personal use. We hate developers that turn on their own users, preying on their loyalty and support, forcing them to fork out money for software that’s always been free.

That said, as of EasyBCD 2.1, companies and individuals using EasyBCD in commercial settings, as a part of a commercial package, etc. will need to obtain a commercial license. Commercial licenses are currently priced at $24.95 a seat (flexibly defined as per-user or per-machine, your call) with volume licensing available at reduced rates. Simply, if you’re using EasyBCD to make money, you can help invest in making it a better product for yourself and everyone.

Licensed EasyBCD users are given priority support, with the option of discussing custom deployment and/or product customization options. All EasyBCD licenses are lifetime licenses, future updates and releases forever included. We hope you will all stand by us during this transition, and we look forward to bringing new and exciting products to bear in the near future.

Download EasyBCD 2.1 (1.377 MiB)

Buy Commercial License ($24.95)

Major new features:

• EasyBCD setup detects missing or out-of-date .NET 2.0 pre-requirement, and automatically installs.
• New options to boot from hard disk or floppy images. No longer just VHDs, raw disk images now work too!
• Much-improved BCD parsing methodology that works even when bcdedit doesn’t!
• Intelligent external BCD handling. Automatically determines drive settings, and warns if entries aren’t portable as created.
• Added a “No Timeout” option of the boot menu, wherein the selection screen will hang until a selection is made.
• As usual, EasyBCD now features improved and more-resilient support for even more Linux configurations.

A complete list of changes can be found in the full changelog.

Cheers and don’t forget to Like us on Facebook and follow us on twitter @NeoSmart!