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, scheduled for release in early 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.  It is not commonly known but OS/2's Lockup feature has a serious bug in that when it activates, it resets the priorities on all threads running on the system.  While this isn't very noticeable on many systems, a system that is running programs that run at "idle" priority (such as system monitoring tools, network messaging, etc.) are suddenly reset to "normal" priority which can cause performance loss and instability in some systems.  The screen saver not only does not have those problems but offers far superior security to the basic Lock up feature.

Another plus of OS/2 Essentials 2.0 is that it comes on CD.  Stardock decided to use the extra space to distribute IBM's Fixpack 1 for OS/2 Warp 4 and the latest FixPack for OS/2 Warp 3.  Other "goodies" on the CD include Adobe's Acrobat Reader, Java updates, and numerous other programs, utilities, and files that are on the Internet.

OS/2 Essentials 2.0 is $49.95 for new users and a $19.95 upgrade for existing users.