Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

You'd be in good company if you'd never dreamt that these utilities were needed on a palmtop with a solid state disk. Atelier beg to differ and have the product to prove it. The commercial Essential Disk Utilities (EDU, and I won't knock the boring name, as at least it describes what the product is!) is a kind of 'Norton Utilities' for the Series 5. Atelier have a web site, so you can get more information direct from the horse's mouth. I've been reviewing the full commercial release.

EDU is really a suite of four separate utilities. Most people will head straight for Optimise, which defragments Psion disk drives. If, like me, you've often wondered how Compact Flash disks work and have been secretly worrying about how the files are being messed around with in order to keep squeezing them on, then this utility can take a weight off your mind.

Running Optimise on my 70% full 24Mb Compact Flash took around 10 minutes, at the end of which all file fragments had been made contiguous (i.e. joined together) and folders optimised. The two main displays are a graphical one which animates the file consolidation process and a staid text one which just shows the state of play prior to optimisation. It's all quite slick and confidence-inspiring and yes, my CF disk and files were all still there afterwards. I couldn't detect any performance improvement, but that's not to say there wasn't one and at least I now had peace of mind about the state of my CF file system!

Next up is CheckDisk, which scans the file system for errors (bad structure, lost clusters etc.), though on most Series 5s I wouldn't expect this type of error to occur anyway. Apparently, one cause of disk errors is the sharing of CF disks with a Windows PC, via PC-card adaptors, but I'd also expect low battery voltages to occasionally cause 'funnies'. The checking process is very quick on a flash disk but rather grinds to a halt on an internal disk with Messaging Suite messages stored within. I tried CheckDisk immediately after experiencing several worrying resets on a GeoFox palmtop and noted that it found four different things wrong with the filing system on my CF disk, fixing them in a few seconds and letting me carry on working with as little lost as possible.

A vital tool to have on hand if you ever hit a file system problem while miles from your PC backup. As with the equivalent PC utilities, 'orphaned' blocks of data get saved to the root directory with suitably obvious filenames.

SmartFormat allows advanced users to customise the way their CF disk is formatted. Five different options are available, including one specially designed to minimise the space wastage that happens when over-large cluster sizes are used on a disk. A 'good for all seasons' approach is to choose the 'Atelier'-recommended format option. Using it rather than the default Psion format saved me 3Mb in available space on a 24Mb CF disk and 4.5Mb on a 32Mb, both well worth the effort. Although the actual formatting only took a few seconds, the long bit was waiting for PsiWin (even at 115k baud) to restore all my files!

DiskEditor is where advanced users can browse the raw disk sectors, with a frightening option to be able to actually edit the hexadecimal contents! Wisely, this is turned off by default by Atelier. For casual users, this utility will only be of use for the ability to search a Psion disk for a particular text or hexadecimal string, and even then the matched sector locations are not easily paired with locatable filenames.

The rather slim manual Atelier provide is an odd beast, concentrating 9 of its 24 pages on the hugely-scary DiskEditor. Granted, this utility needs a lot of explanation, but to give it this fraction of paper space places undue emphasis on it for the 99% of users who shouldn't go near DiskEditor. In contrast, the immensely-useful CheckDisk only get two-thirds of a page and SmartFormat a frustratingly-brief two pages. This latter section could do with a table showing users with each size of CF disk whether re-formatting would be beneficial.

Although expensive at £40 (in the UK), Essential Disk Utilities is an impressive set of utilities that certainly made an impact on me, but then I'm fairly technical and fascinated by computer internals. If you have good backups and don't know your cluster size from your file fragments you probably won't ever really need EDU. 'Power' users who care passionately about making the most of every kilobyte of space will appreciate its possibilities a whole lot more.

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