| 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.
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.
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!
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.
 FM/2 v2.38 (note: this link retrieves v2.39)
 FM/2 v2.38 (note: this link retrieves v2.39)Our Sponsors: [BMT Micro] [DeScribe] [EmTec] [Indelible Blue] [SPG]
  Contents |
  Contents |  Previous Article |   Next Article
  Previous Article |   Next Article 
Copyright © 1996 - Haligonian Media