Review: FM/2 v2.38- by Steven Atchue

A couple of things came to mind while I was watching the beginning of what ended up to be the blizzard of '96. The first thought that hit me was that I had lots of shoveling to do. My second thought was a futile attempt at delaying the first thought as long as possible. I decided that it was time to do some rigorous directory restructuring. I am not a very organized person; on my D: drive alone there are twenty or so subdirs with "test matter" in them. And my D: drive is by far the most orderly.

Enter FM/2 v2.38. FM/2, in addition to being a file manager, resembles a hardy utility package like PCtools or Norton Utilities--a Swiss Army Knife of sorts. All of its functions may be used from its main interface, a command line or a WPS object. It is not just a simple file manager, even though it's simpler to navigate than many of it's competitors. Version 2.38 also addresses a few small problems and adds a couple of features requested by users.

Look and Features

Visually, FM/2 is yet another implementation of a standard file manager layout (gif 12.8k), but with a LOT of options. It presents the user with a window or "container" listing available drives which can be expanded into tree structures and another "container" with a file list. Also standard equipment, are the button bar (either text or icons), the status bars at the bottom of the main window (free disk space, details of selected file(s), etc.), loads of context sensitive pop-up menus, a settings notebook and archive management ability.

FM/2's file management is superior to any WPS or text based file manager I have seen. With a responsive interface, FM/2 implements "walking" features that simplify changing drives and directories. Right mouse menus also ease file operations. Some of the useful utilities that were omitted from warp, like DELTREE and a disk optimizer, are also included.

Configurability

As far as usability goes the main interface is very ergonomic and also very configurable (gif 10k). Its toolbar is laid out displaying (by default) most of FM/2's options and can be changed to suit the user's working habits. Configuration options are so plentiful that I can't list them all here. In fact, the novice user could easily get overwhelmed by all the selection. You'll want to play for a while and explore these options if you plan to use FM/2 regularly.

Getting Down to Business

The first order of business for my "drive cleaning" was finding out how many duplicate files existed so I could minimize disk usage. Piece of cake! The "collector" option allowed me to search my drives using custom options, one of those options being to find duplicate files. Out of roughly 22,000 files spanning 2 gigabytes of space there were almost 2,000 exact duplicates.

After deleting all the duplicate files I went on to hand pick the directories and files I would earmark for removal or relocation. To complete this chore from the main interface was effortless. The drive and directory "containers" are lightning fast and right mouse button menus are slickly implemented for ease of use. The restructuring and deleting of my hard drive took nearly four hours. I figure this is just a fraction of the time it would have took me to completely "rebuild" from a freshly formatted drive. Now my drive was very well organized, but still not very clean.

Next, it was time to break out the optimizer to "clean up" any messiness that I had created after hacking for four hours. Optimizing went pretty much without a hitch, with the exception of my D: (boot) drive. It seems that in order to optimize your boot drive it must be unlocked, and the only way to achieve this is by booting from floppy (which I have yet to do). This can be done by making boot disks with Warp's utility or a third party utility.

Upon completion of my drive cleaning, my system had "realized" a total gain of about 150 Mb of disk space, not to mention the unused and fragmented space that was wasted on my FAT drives before optimizing. Well, to do all this without rebooting was quite daring, but I shut it down and rebooted. No problem! Booting up was noticeably faster--I am assuming this is a result of optimization. All of my files were now alphabetically arranged in recognizable directories--this was just too much!

The Extras

FM/2 comes with a few other "techie" utilities. The one that most caught my eye was the INI editor (gif 11k). There are a lot of things that get "beached" in your system files as a result of installing applications and then deleting them. I install a ton of software then delete it. Little did I know until I used the INI editor how valuable an uninstall program really is. There were references to software that I had installed over a year ago (i.e. Ultimail) and removed almost immediately and these references can affect performance dramatically. There is also a lot of info in your INI files that you should not touch, which I learned the hard way.

So I carefully (I thought) started hacking every reference to anything I did not recognize out of the OS2.INI and OS2sys.INI files. Then I decided another reboot was in order. Everything seemed fine; the system booted up even faster than before. The WPS popped up blazingly fast and everything was going great. Then I noticed a few abnormalities. Be warned, there are some things that you should not fool with in your system files.

Drawbacks

FM/2's shortcomings are almost nil but there are some. First: the lack of a utility that makes a bootdisk. Routine maintenance of locked disks is impossible without boot disks so this feature would be nice. Second: support. Currently the program is very stable, well documented and even includes an uninstall program. However, the support via e-mail is a little slow and could be improved. Third: the program is so option heavy that it can seem cluttered and overwhelm the OS/2 novice.

Is it a Winner?

All in all FM/2 is a very consistent product. The level of experience required varies with the feature, but for the most part it is for everyone and the utilities included should suit even the most technical user. FM/2 has found a spot on my launchpad, and after using it I imagine you will find a spot for it on your desktop also. The pricing is very affordable and updates are regular. A first class product all the way through
* FM/2 v2.38 (note: this link retrieves v2.39)
Barebones Software
Author: Mark Kimes
Registration: US$40 (personal) US$80 (commercial)
Steven Atchue has been in the computer industry since the birth of the AT. Currently, he is doing product reviews, freelance writing and for fun he is building his own house. Steve can also be reached on CompuServe.

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