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why would you want to buy PowerDesk?

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mouser:
Powerdesk was *THE* explorer replacement at one time.. It was a great tool.  They just stopped developing it and others eventually surpassed them.

Midnight Rambler:
I’d be interested to know if your preference for PowerDesk is just about familiarity, or if it genuinely has acquired functionality or something ergonomic that gives it an edge over the other (increasingly extensive!) non-Microsoft competition.
-oblivion (August 19, 2013, 10:13 AM)
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Familiarity has a lot to do with it and have also tried XYplorer but found it still can't match Powerdesk's View>File Panes function and Drivebar toolbar.

oblivion:
I’d be interested to know if your preference for PowerDesk is just about familiarity, or if it genuinely has acquired functionality or something ergonomic that gives it an edge over the other (increasingly extensive!) non-Microsoft competition.
-oblivion (August 19, 2013, 10:13 AM)
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Familiarity has a lot to do with it and have also tried XYplorer but found it still can't match Powerdesk's View>File Panes function and Drivebar toolbar.-Midnight Rambler (August 19, 2013, 10:30 AM)
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XYPlorer is much better at being pushed around into configurations that suit what you're doing at any given time but it's a lot less user-friendly out of the box. And, rather like Opus, it has a LOT of power and configurability that's available but not easy to get to grips with -- particularly early on -- and I'm still far from comfortable with the scripting language of either. However, it has tabs that are extremely configurable (and can have different settings from each other) and although I'm not sure everyone gets it straight away, there's a tree mode that effectively displays just the places you go. The drivebar was one of the things I missed when I ditched PD but Opus has one just like it and both Opus and XYPlorer have a drives dropdown that's just as functional in lots less precious realestate.

There was a time, with Opus, when the paradigm shift just happened, and I knew I'd got something I could work with. XYPlorer is taking longer to reach that point but I think I'm within sight of the time when the clouds will just suddenly part.

I think, remembering back, when I first used Opus I tried hard to make it look and feel like PowerDesk, because that's what I was used to. My favourites list still has echoes of what it was when I used PD. XYplorer can't easily be made to look and feel like PD -- it has an economy to it that means a lot of things you think you need aren't instantly available (and sometimes turn out to be just eye-candy), but I can easily see that the transition from PD to XY would be difficult and even frustrating.

Reading this back, I suspect you're going to think that I'm trying to convince you to change. I'm not, really -- just reminiscing about the transitions I went through, as much as anything. I DO think that if you decide to jump ship you'll do better with Opus than XY -- because it's less of a culture change -- but I'd also suggest you go here and reconfigure it along the lines suggested before going too far, just because (a) it worked for me, and (b) a lot of ex-PowerDesk users seem to love the approach taken. :)

mwb1100:
tried XYplorer but found it still can't match Powerdesk's View>File Panes function and Drivebar toolbar.
-Midnight Rambler (August 19, 2013, 10:30 AM)
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I'm not sure what View>File Panes does, but XYplorer has has drivebar functionality for a while now (though you had to configure the toolbar to get it):  http://www.xyplorer.com/release_10.10.htm

Midnight Rambler:
I'm not sure what View>File Panes does, but XYplorer has has drivebar functionality for a while now (though you had to configure the toolbar to get it):  http://www.xyplorer.com/release_10.10.htm
-mwb1100 (August 22, 2013, 07:19 PM)
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File Panes simply shows separate drive details horizontally (as pictured above and/or below) or vertically.  It's especially handy when moving files between drives.

Thanks for the Drive Bar link.  As seen below, I've installed it but didn't read far enough to know if it can be installed as a separate bar as is so easily done in PD.  That's the thing about PD; it's extremely user-friendly as oblivion wrote.  One major gripe about it though is that it sometimes loads slow or incompletely (at least compared with XYplorer) implying that it's a resource hog.

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