The first noticeable aspect about Explorer++ is that it is a fully portable application, it can be executed from anywhere. The memory footprint is acceptable with roughly 6 Megabytes of computer memory and 3 Megabytes of virtual memory.

Explorer++ supports tabbed browsing making use of the same keyboard shortcuts that Firefox uses. CTRL T opens a new tab which effectively means that only one explorer window has to be opened all the time for all file and folder operations.

Tabs can be bookmarked for future access which is another much needed feature for every Windows Explorer replacement.

It supports filters and splitting and merging of files. As I said before it is no match for the heavy weight Total Commander like applications which support so many features that it is hard to keep an overview.

It would have been nice if you could divide the main explorer window into two panes which would both show the contents of a folder or drive. That would make file operations much easier in my opinion. One has to consider that Explorer++ was released as alpha and that the software developer will surely add functionality to his software program, we just have to wait a bit longer.

TeraCopy is a nice shell enhancement for Windows replacing the original copy popup with a more advanced version. It integrates itself into the context menu so that you work as usual and don’t need to run additional external applications for the same process. TeraCopy gives you more options to copy or move files, e.g. a pause/resume function, error recovery and an dynamically adjusted buffer.

Error recovery means that it tries to copy the file several times and if it doesn’t succeed in copying this file it just continues with the next one. This means that it does not abort the whole transfer which is quite important for copying large amounts of data.

By adjusting the value of the buffer size on the fly it is possible to make the transfer commence a bit faster. I didn’t actually test it but they say it may speed up file transfers between two hard drives slightly. You can also switch between compact mode and full mode. Full mode shows a complete list of transfered files and warns about failed transfers.