OS/2 Essentials

OS/2 Essentials was created to give OS/2 professionals the tools they most often need. It comes with several utilities that IS managers and end users alike will find useful.

OS/2 Essentials was designed to supply what Stardock considered basic features that OS/2 left out.  OS/2 Essentials 1.0 came with a file manager, a screen saver, a directory space grapher, a window manager, and an arcade game.  Since then, it has been able to observe which market segments were using it and which ones were not.

Most of OS/2 Essentials' sales have been to large corporations who want to use the screen saver or the directory space grapher or the file manager.  The arcade game actually was a negative to the product because administrators didn't want to encourage gaming for obvious reasons.  The window manager, FileBar, was top notch but conflicted with Stardock's own workplace shell strategy which focus on Object Desktop.

Version 2.0 of OS/2 Essentials, released in June of 1997 drops the arcade game and window manager and adds a real benchmarking program. Being able to gauge the relative speed of a system's CPU, video, hard disk, and memory has been one of the most requested features for OS/2 Essentials for some time. Both end users and administrators looking to see how their system is performing in a quick and easy fashion will have use for this feature.

DirMaster has been updated to improve its performance and the WPS Trashcan has been updated to allow it to more fully integrate itself into OS/2 making it behave as a true trashcan. The screen saver has been updated with new modules and new features as well. One reason why it is so attractive to corporate users is due to its security features.