AccelMan

Beyond this negative, though, AccelMan offers a tremendous amount of functionality, which makes the difficulty in accessing it all the more frustrating. There is, of course, a built in file viewer which shows graphics, PDFs, and Office documents, and even provides a simple hexadecimal viewer for file types it can't directly open.

Another nice feature is bookmarking--you can select a file and add it to a quick access toolbar, and then assign an action to that mark--for example, open the file, or open an explorer window in that directory.

There are many other useful tools packaged in AccelMan, which I do not recall seeing in other programs. There is a file splitter/joiner--useful if you need to move a large file to small media or upload it to a server with file size limitations. There are built-in filters for many directories, such as quickly showing only PDF files in your "Documents" folder or only C++ files in a program source directory. The total feature list is huge, and you can be discovering new functionality, and ways to use the old functionality, constantly.

AccelMan is now freeware. You do need to install a registry key to unlock all of the program's functionality, but that key is available for free download on the vendor's Web site.

--Ian Harac