PackRat. (Polaris Software Inc.'s PackRat 5.011 personal information manager) (Software Review) (one of seven evaluations on personal information management systems in 'Personal Information Managers for Windows') (Evaluation)

INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION: Very Good

PackRat provides superior control over installation, indicating just how much space is required and how much is available on specified drives. You may have to search a bit to find enough free space, since PackRat is disk hungry. (It's delivered on four 3.5MB disks.) Fortunately, Polaris gives the user tight control over what parts of the program are installed.

Nevertheless, a default installation consumes 7MB of your disk space. Although the program occupies a similarly large amount of Windows memory -- 964KB on our test bed -- it was much more sparing with the more important Windows system resources, requiring only 3 percent.

PackRat 5.0 is also much more customizable than previous versions of the program. To begin with, you can control the colors and fonts of most elements on-screen. But Version 5.0 also lets you create new "folders" (a work space that contains the tools you need to do a particular task) in addition to the phone book, phone log, daily schedule, and other folders that come preconstructed. When you construct a new folder, you select from approximately 30 PackRat "objects" -- including list viewers, day and week views, clocks, printers, trash cans and notepads.

Objects are, however, not the only part of PackRat's customizability. While objects are used to display or act upon data, it is "forms" that you employ to enter and structure data. And PackRat's data forms are also customizable in Version 5.0.

Although you can learn to manipulate objects and forms relatively easily -- learning to add a custom field to the phonebook, for example, took us only about 10 minutes -- you can go a long way toward customizing the program right at installation. During installation you can use the SmartSelect feature to select from a list of a half-dozen "professions." Depending upon the profession you select, PackRat will be installed with a different configuration of folders and objects.

Importing our phone book of 450 contacts was easy, though not as easy as it could be. When you designate the file to import in the program's import utility, PackRat pops up the first record in the file so that you can select fields to import. Unlike some of the other PIMs, however, PackRat …