MenuWorks Advanced - PC Dynamics

Home Office Computing, Feb, 1992 by Henry Beechhold

VERSION REVIEWED: 2.0

LIST PRICE: $90

STREET PRICE RANGE: $67-$84

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: 512K IBM compatible; hard-disk drive; CGA, EGA, VGA, or Hercules; mouse optional; DOS 2.0 or higher

PUBLISHER: PC Dynamics, 31332 Via Colinas, Suite 102, Westlake Village, CA 91362; (818) 889-1741

Like most other DOS menu or shell programs, MenuWorks provides text-only, point-and-shoot panels. Unlike many, its 3-D panels give the screen a touch of style--sort of an iconless Windows look. At installation, the program examines the hard-disk drive and automatically categorizes your files under several appropriate headings (DOS utilities, disk utilities, programming languages, accounting programs, and so on), which appear in one of the action panels each time you run MenuWorks. It is able to recognize about 2,000 popular programs, but you can easily create a virtually unlimited number of custom menus and sub-menus as required, with password protection if you choose.

This powerful disk and file management system is at once simple and complex. To take advantage of all the hidden goodies in the program--menu scripting, hypertext functions, timed-release program execution, and others--you will have to spend a fair amount of time "at play." To build your own menus, for example, the program gives you a programming language of more than 50 commands--the principal reason for the designation, advanced. MenuWorks even provides a facility for tracking and printing system usage, a valuable feature in a network or multiuser context.

MenuWorks lets you perform all the usual DOS management functions as well as enhancements of those functions (like a fullscreen editor, a vast improvement over DOS's own editing utility)--all from a set of self-explanatory panels. But, alas, it's missing a file-unerase utility, a lack surprising in so thorough a piece of software.