Q-Dir – A Great Free Replacement For Windows Explorer

My laptop, which is between one and two years old, is starting to behave in some very strange and undesirable ways.

For example, things lock up (applications or all of Windows), I get the occasional BSOD, CHKDSK starts but will never finish, etc.

And relatively recently, I’ve been having problesm with Windows Explorer, which I use a lot – usually two instances are running at any one time.

One main problem is that the first time I try to run it after a reboot, it locks up most of Windows, and my only solution is to use the Task Manager to kill the explorer.exe process, which I know is risky, and then to use the Run command to open the application again.

In most cases, this works fine – but not always, which then leads to yet another reboot.

And these past few days, it’s been going unresponsive for no apparent reason at random times.

As I need this application to do a lot of what I do, I decided enough was enough and went on the hunt for a good replacement for Windows Explorer (and preferably one that was free).

A quick search on Google instantly turned up a couple of contenders, so I downloaded both and tried them out.

The first was Explorer++, created by David Erceg, and the second was Q-Dir, created by Nenad Hrg.

So, what were the relative pros and cons of each of them?

The good news is that both are free, and both can be run as portable apps.

Explorer++ supports multiples tabs, which is a nice feature, and I particularly liked the Bookmarks toolbar for fast access to folders used regularly. (One of my all-time favourite applications is Folder Guide, which integrates nicely with Windows XP Pro, so I wanted to replicate this funcationality if possible.)

However, my biggest issues with Explorer++ were the strange way it sorts and/or groups folder contents, and it also seems to be very slow.

Q-Dir, on the hand, is very fast indeed, and instead of supporting multiple tabs, it does offer multiple panes, anywhere from one to four of them, which makes drag and dropping of files really fast and easy.

The help information on both apps is somewhat sparse, and at first, the thing I didn’t like about Q-Dir was the fact I couldn’t work out how to use the Quick Links feature (which is this app’s Folder Guide type functionality), but once I tracked that down, it met all of my requirements, and this is the one I think I’ll be sticking with.

So, if you’re looking for a good, free Windows Explorer alternative, my vote goes for Q-Dir.

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