Summary: How can you tell what's wrong? And how can you determine the capabilities of your computer when the manufacturer's spec. sheet disappeared? Gammatech and Graham Utilities have some solutions.

There are many times when you will need to know the technical specifics of your machine's hardware, for when upgrading, or installing new software, or tracking the cause of a problem. There are also times when you need to get a picture of what's going on inside the operating system, how it's using memory, and how many threads are running.

System Information

The classic "SysInfo" program has been a staple of utility suites ever since Norton Utilities in the DOS days. But while Norton's SI.EXE was comprehensive and even featured benchmarks integrated within the same program, both Graham Utilities and Gammatech split their reports into separate programs.

The so called "System Information" utilities that both suites supply are little more than a text file report displayed in a scrolling window. Graham's SI.EXE program will tell you basics such as the machine type, operating system version (you may be surprised to know that Warp 4 reports itself as OS/2 version 2.40), display driver type and a handfull of other basics.

Gammatech is a little better, it will tell you more about your system's basics, including physical memory and Presentation Manager statistics (everything from the width of window borders to the cursor blink rate). But again, it's nothing more than a text report in a scrolling window.

They each get better when you run the programs designed to specifically focus on a particular information type, such as the hard drive or HPFS structure.

Gammatech has an Analyze utility (.GIF, 15K) that not only reports on hard drive and filesystem details, but also scans the hard drive for bad sectors and other defects. It does not offer to fix what it finds, however. In another program, Disk Map (.GIF, 10K), you can see a graphical representation of the disk's contents. That's about all DiskMap does, however. It would be nice if it could defragment the drive graphically in this program, but it doesn't. That's in the realm of its competitor.

Graham offers more or less the same informaiton in its System Diagnostics program (see below), which aside to its main function will display a wide variety of information on your system's basics, detailed serial and parallel port information and more. It's HPFS-View and FAT-View programs will also display the contents of a disk graphically, and defragment them as you watch.

Gammatech	Pass. Reports on all of your system essentials in an easy to use GUI
Graham	Pass. More information than Gammatech in the basic hardware department, none if you're looking for details on the Presentation Manager system.

System Diagnosis

In order to find a problem in your computer's configuration or hardware, it's necessary to cull more than just the statistics that System Information programs supply. You need to run programs that actively test the system.

For this, Graham Utilities is well equipped. Its System Diagnostics program, which runs in a fullscreen session, can test almost everything except perhaps specialty hardware. It can test serial and parallel ports, test printers with graphics, plain text or postscript, and has a wide number of video tests that cover everything from color purity to VGA graphics (it can't test the super-VGA modes, however). It also has a set of hard drive tests that are more comprehensive than the one found in Gammatech's Analyze utility.

And speaking of which, Analyze's disk scan is really all that Gammatech has to offer in the system diagnosis category.

Gammatech	Fail. It can test hard drives, that's it.
Graham	Pass. A gamut of tests for checking the functioning status of your system components.

Current Processes and Memory

All of a sudden, with no warning whatsoever, Graham Utilities suddenly pops up with a graphical process and monitoring program with a smart looking memory and CPU usage display, called Task Manager. Whereas practically the entire suite runs in character mode or fullscreen sessions, this new edition that came in a service pack for the suite, is the only utility in Graham Utilities that runs in a Presentation Manager window. And it's actually pretty slick, as far as process monitors go.

An interesting feature that may be highly useful to programmers is a "Compact Memory" function. It works by momentarily allocating as much physical memory as possible, then releasing it. This forces OS/2 to unload anything that isn't absolutely necessary and store it in the swap file. The result is a huge increase in the amount of available physical RAM that's reported. If you look at the screenshot to the right, under the Memory Usage History, the deep dip in the yellow line (which shows RAM usage, not availability) is where I activated this function. This is not the same as a "Ram doubling" utility, however. It does not compress memory and it will not improve system performance. In fact, it'll slow down your computer momentarily as you switch to other applications and OS/2 has to read back from the swap file.

Gammatech Utilities does not have any process or memory monitoring utilities.

Gammatech	Fail. No process, memory or CPU monitoring utilities
Graham	Pass. But only on a technicality. Task Manager is not included out of the box, but is available as a free update to the suite