Fw: XTree Gold substitutes.

["Michael Edwards" mje@xxxxxxxx]

[Again, I resend a message that appears to have got lost in the system: most of
them come back to me within two minutes or so - it's one of the
quickest-responding mailing lists I've ever seen - but occasionally a message
seems to get lost. My apologies for the duplication if the original eventually
shows up: on one mailing list at one time, messages finally appeared about 5
*days* later; I was then told that the list's host, ListBot, had been taken over
by Microsoft, which seems a strange coincidence!]


                         Michael Edwards.

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[Paul Breeze:]

>With regard to your problem with XTree Gold, there is a shareware program
>called ZTree (don't have the website to hand but if you do a search you'll
>soon find it) that was developed to be a Win9x version of XTree. It is
>still a DOS program but handles things like long file names, large hard
>disks etc. It should solve you're problem.
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   Thanks, Paul; that does sound interesting. Actually I think I do have that
somewhere: it was one of those shareware disks I found at one of those Sunday
computer markets, and I saw it at a time when I was still using XTree Gold and
didn't expect to need anything more; but for $2 or so I was curious enough to
see how good it would be to buy it - but in the end I never got round to looking
at it. (I bought shareware crazily at that time, mostly DOS stuff, and have
perhaps a couple of hundred disks.)
   Could this be the one you mean? It is only on a single 1.44 Mb. floppy
disk, so it obviously can't be a huge program. (Could be zipped or compressed
on that disk though - I don't remember.)
   Is it really as good as XTree Gold? I somehow have the feeling that if
something is shareware you can pick up for a few dollars, it somehow can't be
all that good, because you only get what you pay for. The problem with using
such a good program as XTree Gold is that you get spoilt: you expect very high
standards of other programs that won't often be met, and if the good program
nevertheless turns out to be inadequate in some particular way, it'll be very
difficult to find a good substitute, and very difficult to accept and use
something inferior.
   (Using Windows Explorer after XTree Gold really makes me squirm. But of
course even a wonderful program like XTree Gold can't be criticized for failing
to anticipate long file-names - a dumb change if ever I saw one. Who wants to
have to contantly type 20- or 40-character file-names? Perhaps, in hindsight,
the limit could have been a bit more generous than 8 characters - but I don't
find that limitation burdensome enough to want to disrupt everything by
introducing the longer ones. Long file-names are one of the biggest headaches
in my computer life these days.)
   Given that I've used that dinosaur MultiMate for maybe 12 years (I've got a
friend who finds that endlessly funny and laughs at it, and he calls the program
"Mutilate" and tells me to get a *real* word-processor), I suspect if I change
to XY-Write, I'll probably be with it for life. Would that be unusual?

             Regards,
             Michael Edwards.