What's the best Windows Explorer Alternative???

[joeman24]

Hey all, have been considering an explorer alt. for a while but want to know what you folks think. As always FREE is good but if something is worth it I'll pay please post your suggestions. Again this is WINDOWS explorer not Internet Explorer...I've already wised up on that and have been using firefox for years.

Joe

[tokenuser]

There are always alternative out there, but what exactly do you want to do with this alternate app?

Sometimes just sticking with the default, but configuring it a little differently is better since it does not take additional resources.

[joeman24]

Obviously I want it to be capable of everything that WExplorer is but was wondering if there was something out there with possibly a better user interface and a few more capabilities and faster...cut, copy, paste, diff, views the entire ball of wax. Basically i was just wondering if there was anything better and/or different out there.

[Ryudo]

http://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?libid=7


I think I used this few years ago or something like it,installed a whole new thing on top ..back then I had a PC that could not take it so it ran rather slow ...but not tried it on this PC so not sure how fast it really is.

But I guess you can try it see how it work for you.

[computoman]

I do not know what the best alternative is but I plan to rebuild my xp machine and run kde on it.

[illu45]

Er... right.

As far as alternatives go, there are quite a few free and paid ones out there. There is a pretty good roundup here (http://www.simplehelp.net/2006/10/11/10-windows-explorer-alternatives-compared-and-reviewed/) while Lifehacker reccomends (http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/replace-windows-explorer-with-xplorer2-258730.php) Xplorer2 (http://zabkat.com/x2lite.htm), which has both a paid and a free version (the free one has fewer features, but acts as a fairly good try before you buy idea).

From my personal experience with WinExplorer alternatives, I've found that most of them are significantly slower (especially in terms of load times) than the original. Granted, this is mostly attributable to the fact that Windows Explorer is pretty much constantly running in the background (explorer.exe in processes) and thus doesn't actually need to 'boot up', like alternatives do. Still, at the end of the day, the increase in functionality never appeared to me as being worth the decrease in speed. However, you might disagree.

[fishtoprecords]

I actually like Windows Exploder. Been using it since 3.0. Whenever I help someone with Windows, the first thing I do is find W-Exploder. Its buried way down on modern versions, but its an oldie but goodie.

[joeman24]

Thanks everyone I'll try them out.