Dave Donaldson

Two Essential Tools for Vista

Saturday, June 07 2008

By all accounts, I'm the only person on Earth who has not experienced any real issues with Windows Vista. It's a shame really because Vista's overall experience is so much better than any previous Windows operating system. Yet not a day goes by without some new report of how big a failure Vista has been.

But for all my good luck with Vista, there are a couple things that surprisingly don't perform as you'd expect from an improved Windows operating system: copying files and Windows Explorer.

When it comes to copying files in Vista, I've yet to see a dialog box that tells me it's going to take 6,209 days to copy 2MB worth of files, but it's not always consistent either. Sometimes it's really fast and other times it's definitely slower. It got a little better with SP1, but still not really what it should be.

As for Windows Explorer, there are times it just crashes. It's not all that often, but it's noticeable enough for me to bring it up. Granted, it always recovers nicely, but we should be past the days of Windows Explorer crashing, for any reason. In addition to the crashes, every great now and then it takes forever to respond when I click on a different folder. I mean, it's just an updated version of File Manager from Windows 3.1. The last thing I'd expect to have problems with in a Windows operating system is Windows Explorer.

With that being said, I recently came across two tools that alleviate both of these problems: TeraCopy and Xplorer2.

I came across TeraCopy in a blog post by Jon Galloway. I don't want to completely steal Jon's content, so I'll just cherry-pick some choice phrases: "shell integration into Explorer is really smooth", "that nice Pause button", "should my VPN drop or the copy fail for any other reason, that button changes to Resume and I can continue the copy from where it left off". And even though Jon has a couple screenshots of TeraCopy, I'll include one of my own:

So yes, TeraCopy's features are nice, but the most important thing is that it copies files fast. It performs like Vista should perform, and is definitely a must have tool.

Xplorer2

I found out about Xplorer2 in a tweet from Rick Strahl. Curious, I had to check it out and am definitely glad I did. It's got some nice features such as tabbed windows and a dual-pane viewer, but its best features are its performance and stability. Definitely an improvement over Windows Explorer and something to strongly consider.

One thing to know if you're using Xplorer2 and TortoiseSVN: if you want the icon overlays of TortoiseSVN to appear in Xplorer2, be sure to uncheck "Show overlays only in explorer" in your TortoiseSVN settings. That tripped me up for a few minutes until I realized that I had that setting turned on. After unchecking it I was good to go.

Enjoy.