Every so often, users of all different kinds of operating system can be seen pulling their hair out and shouting "Argh! Why won't it let me do that?!". This is because some of the potentially most useful functions just don't make it into the development schedules of some operating systems. This, in turn, has led to a healthy trade in third-party utilities which help to fill in the gaps. Such a utility is Drive Mapper 2, which could be called 'The tool that Microsoft (and others) forgot'.

Disk Mapper 2 is not a multi-purpose box of tricks. All it does is provide a graphical representation of the amount of space consumed by the various files and directories on your hard drive. That's all. Exciting, eh? Actually, while it may not be exciting, it is very useful. Only when you see the graphical representation of your hard drive do you realise just how corpulent some Windows applications (and, indeed, the operating system itself) have become. Disk Mapper 2 provides this function very rapidly, even adding itself to the right-click menu, so that you can instantly check the capacities of drives and folders.

The user interface is one with which most users will be familiar, since it's based on the Windows 95 Explorer program. The left-hand pane shows a directory listing, which you can navigate using the mouse, while the right-hand pane shows the files and directories within the currently-selected drive or directory, all colour-coded to show their 'depth'. The bigger the rectangle occupied by a particular file or directory, the more data it contains (and the tool-tips function of the mouse will tell you exactly how many files and how much data). You can double-click to move up or down the directory tree, or even launch a program, while there's also an option to compress files and directories using a Zip-compatible algorithm. Files can also be deleted if necessary, and the program can provide information about a chosen file, too, making it a very useful hard drive management utility.

Verdict
Disk Mapper 2 doesn't do anything particularly radical. Instead, it performs a useful task and does so very well. The chances are you'll be amazed at how much space some of your installed applications are consuming (try the demo version from the Web site to find out), but against that must be weighed its price, which would go some way towards the purchase of a second hard drive.

Company: Micro Logic

Contact: 01672 563163

Tags: hard disk drive microsoft microsoft windows operating system file management disk management windows file managers