Power Drawers Review

Stop Exploring and Start Right-Clicking

Whose desktop is it, anyway? Microsoft insists it owns your computing experience, if not your soul (current example: arguing that it's unfair and anticompetitive for AOL to pay PC vendors to display its icon, though it's okay to force vendors -- who, of course, pay Microsoft -- to display MSN icons).

In the days of Windows 3.1, there were several popular shells or alternative interfaces for the operating system, such as Symantec's Norton Desktop, HP's Dashboard, and Compaq's TabWorks. There are far fewer for Windows 98, Me, or 2000 today, and most of them -- like the open-source LiteStep or Stardock.net's Object Desktop -- are aimed primarily at hardcore tweakers and tinkerers, akin to the Linux experts who think it's fun to flip between KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker, and Enlightenment.

But you still have the right to work the way you want, and there are still some Windows enhancers for everyday, productivity-minded users. One of the simplest and slickest is Power Drawers from Dynamic Karma Inc. -- which doesn't replace the standard Windows interface or prevent you from using the Start menu and Windows Explorer as usual, but lets you navigate through folders, files, and programs about twice as fast.

This $35 utility -- compatible with Win 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0, and 2000 -- works both to clean up your Windows desktop and to reduce the amount of time you need to spend there (i.e., the chore of minimizing or closing application windows to get back to the desktop).

First, its PowerOrganizer module optionally scans your Start menu items and cluttered desktop shortcuts, replacing the latter with a trimmed-down set of desktop folders or groups -- "Internet" for browsers and e-mail clients, "Multimedia," "Utilities," and so forth, with an option to skew the groups for the type of work you do, such as general business, graphics design, or Web development.

We were a bit bemused to see PowerOrganizer list Microsoft Word 2000 under "Desktop Publishing," but it failed to classify only a couple of obscure applications (such as an advertising animation) among the dozens on our hard disk. By default, the organizer rescans daily to pigeonhole newly installed programs and prune dead shortcuts.

The heart of Power Drawers, however, is a shell extension that adds mega-functionality to your right mouse button. Right-click on an Explorer folder icon, one of Power Drawers' program-category folders or Recent Folders desktop icon, or -- if you've got one or more applications filling the screen and don't want to navigate back to the desktop -- the Start button, and up pops a list of folders and their contents.

So instead of opening one folder to look for a file, realizing it's not there, closing the folder, opening another, and so on, you can skim at lightning speed through folder after folder. To keep its menus manageable, Power Drawers smartly subcategorizes files by type -- so instead of a big alphabetical list, you're offered a menu including submenus of text files, MP3 files, GIF images, XLS spreadsheets, and the like.

It gets better: Hover over an item in these menus, and you'll see a pop-up (called an ExplorerTip) of information such as a file's last modification date -- either a calendar date, or an exceptionally handy relative indicator like "5.2 months ago" if you're reviewing old documents -- or application's version number. If it's a plain text file, you'll see the first few (your choice of zero to 10) lines of text. If it's an image in a popular graphics format like GIF, JPG, BMP, or ICO, you'll see a thumbnail preview. (Alas, Power Drawers can't preview the contents of Word or Excel files, though it'll show their authors.)

Other functions make it easy to see how much free space is on a hard disk or how much space any one folder is taking, and to associate multiple applications with a single file extension (so you can choose whether to use Word, Internet Explorer, or FrontPage to open an HTML file). Changing an item's icon or pop-up text is easy, as is configuring Power Drawers' screensaver (Dynamic Karma created the classic After Dark, so screensavers are close to the company's heart) with instant-on and password-unlock options.

Any complaints? Well, Power Drawers will install its own slightly cheesy gold animated cursors, sound effects, and wallpaper if you give it half a chance, and it takes an hour or two's getting used to -- commands formerly on Windows Explorer's own right-click menu get moved to an "item options" submenu, for instance.

While you can use it to delete, copy, or paste items, it takes a little caution to know when you're working with actual files versus the utility's many pointers or shortcuts. And the prominent Recent Folders menu might perturb shy or security-conscious users who use TweakUI or another utility to erase their tracks or file histories on a shared or public PC.

But while newcomers might blanch at whipping the mouse around to plunge six or seven menus deep into folders, then up, over, and down again to find files at a glance, power users can get hooked on it. Power Drawers may only save you a few seconds each time you use it, but can easily save you many minutes a day. It's ironic that while Microsoft's main vision of interface improvement is to pare or reduce unused items in menus, adding scads of extra items can make you more productive.

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