Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Come on, gather round & hear about a FREE product that will truly amaze you! No, it’s not a miracle cure for your itchy backside, those painful piles or picking your nose, but you’re close! What is it then? Well, it’s a FREE (everyone’s favourite word!) bit of software that will replace that useless part of Windows called Windows Explorer! Before you say it.., no this marvellous piece of software isn’t going to delete Windows Explorer but merely make you stop using it. You just install the program & use it to your heart’s content. Once you’ve installed Powerdesk 4 you will never use Windows Explorer again. Powerdesk 4 is produced by Ontrack, who make ZipMagic & a few other excellent utilities. You can quite easily download Powerdesk 4 from: https://ontrack.co.uk/powerdesk/ The download is 1128kb, which won’t take long with a 56k modem or above.
Here’s a list of my favourite tools that Powerdesk has built-in, but please remember that these are just some of the tools! The help menu is very comprehensive & should handle most of if not all of your questions. You could also use the Ontrack website to find out more information about Powerdesk. There’s also some free extras that can be downloaded & added to the program to make it better again! When you click on the ‘File’ option on the toolbar you get loads of options, some of which Windows Explorer has, but Powerdesk has loads more!
My favourites here are:
~~ ‘Show all files on drive’ ~ lets you see all the files on the selected drive.
~~ ‘E-mail to’ ~ lets you e-mail files & makes the e-mailing process very easy.
~~ ‘Open with/associate’ ~ Let’s you open the selected file with another program. ~~ ‘Destroy’ ~ Handy when you can just wipe something, rather than just deleting it.
~~ ‘Encrypt/decrypt’ ~ Very handy indeed to stop prying eyes!
When you click on ‘Archive’ option on the toolbar you get options for zipping & unzipping files, which saves you the hassle of having a separate zip program.
Some good options here are:
~~ ‘Add files to Zip’ ~ exactly what it says.
~~ ‘Test zip integrity’ ~ Exactly what it says.
When you click on the ‘View’ option on the toolbar you get loads of options which really make life easier when working with your files. Here’s some of the good ones that I use every day:
~~ ‘Dual pane vertical’ ~ Gives you two windows which let you view different files, folders & drives at the same time. Very good for dragging & dropping files between folders, drives * disks.
~~ ‘Dual pane horizontal’ ~ Exactly the same as the previous option except the windows are linned up differently.
~~ ‘Filters’ ~ lets you filter files from your searches & those that you want to view. This can be handy when you want to see several types of files at the same time & exclude others. When you click on the ‘Options’ option on the toolbar you are given loads of choices of how you can personalise your version of Powerdesk.
There’s too many to list but, again here’s some of the good ones:
~~ ‘Preferences’ ~ You can adjust a lot of things here that makes life easier when using Powerdesk.
~~ ‘Align viewer pane’ ~ This lets you decide if you want the Viewer pane at the bottom or right of the window or detached. The viewer pane lets you see what’s in files & folders without having to open them fully. A very useful tool indeed!
Here’s the meat of the program! When you click on the ‘Tools’ option on the toolbar, you get an awful lot of tools to work with. Here’s my favourites:
~~ ‘Find’ ~ This lets you look for files & folders on your PC. You also have the option of finding a PC on a network. This can be very handy for networked PCs.
~~ ‘Compare folders’ ~ Very handy for sorting through your files & folders for changes.
~~ ‘Disk options’ ~ This tool lets you do a lot of things like, formatting disks, labelling disks, creating a rescue/start-up disk.
There’s more options here but it would take all day to list them. That’s the main features that I use regularly in Powerdesk, but there’s loads more which I haven’t mentioned. The best thing to do is to have a look at the Ontrack website & have a look at the FAQs for the program. There are also guides to using the program & trouble-shooters.
In all, Powerdesk is a very powerful file management program that cuts down on the separate tools that you need. It’s totally free, quick to download & install & is very good at what it does. That’s it folks & sorry for droning on, but this program will save you time & money!