Summary: While each suite covers the basics of system maintenance and disaster recovery, they also include a number of smaller utilities that just make working with OS/2 a little more convenient.

In the Leftovers department, both suites offer a number of smaller and trivial utilities that, while not necessarily being system critical, can help you out during day-to-day tasks and chores. Graham Utilities reins as king here, with literally dozens of such tiny programs.

One of my personal favorites in Graham's suite is the Clipboard utility, which takes a text file name as its parameter and, simply enough, fills the system clipboard with its contents. One of the first uses I put this to was to create a folder of program objects set up to copy such frequently useful data as my e-mail or newsgroup signature, full mailing address, canned e-mail responses, phone numbers and more. By dragging a shadow of this folder to the WarpCenter or Object Desktop's Control Center, I'm about two clicks away from filling the clipboard with a smorgasbord of frequently used text.

Another entry in Graham's goodie bag is the Batch Enhancer, which many will remember from the Norton Utilities of the past. Batch Enhancer, or BE for short, is a multifunction program who's sole purpose is to enhance any simple batch file (.CMD) that you write. It has functions for drawing boxes to the screen (character mode, not graphical ones), playing simple tunes, getting responses from the user, and even as far as controlling system semaphores. Batch Enhancer will be of primary use to people who need to set up a simple query-response program, such as a menu, that doesn't need the Presentation Manager to work.

There's a lot of the other kind of utilities designed for those who spend most of their time at the command prompt. There's an enhanced Change Directories program, a word count utility that can manage multiple files in one go, a program that can convert ZIP and other archive formats to LZH, and another that converts a batch of files to UPPER or lower case. For those who transfer binary files over e-mail or newsgroup systems, Graham also comes with MIME and UU encoding and decoding programs.

Gammatech doesn't have as many of these small utilities. There's a DelTree program for recursively deleting large directory trees (something that's notoriously slow and CPU intensive to do in the Workplace Shell). It's natural counterpart is MakePath, which you'd use to create multiple-depth directories in one pass (as opposed to OS/2's MKDIR, which can only create one directory at a time).

Both suites have utilities for sorting the directory structure on FAT formatted partitions for performance improvements (a procedure unnecessary on HPFS due to its faster, binary-tree method of searching for directories), they also both have programs for scrubbing the free space of your hard drives to make absolutely sure that sensitive, deleted files cannot be recovered. Writing over the disk space with ones and zeroes multiple times to make sure that not even the Government can read what you don't want them to.

Another common program to be found in both Gammatech and Graham utilities, but reserved for more advanced users with an intimate knowledge of filesystem structures are the disk editors: programs that edit the contents of your drives at the very very raw level, bypassing the distinctions made by filenames and directories. Under these programs, disks are all uniform expanses of data, with each sector editable separately. If you're knowledgeable enough you can do anything from modify the partition tables and boot sectors, to edit your CONFIG.SYS. They are NOT recommended for novices or even most intermediate users to play with. One can irrevocably corrupt the delicate data structures of your drives if you're not careful.