PowerDesk Pro Editor's Review

Manage the contents of local and remote hard drives with this advanced, file management tool for Windows.

Keeping a handle on your files and data can be a chore, especially if you've got data going to multiple places.  Its not as easy as it sounds. This is one of the biggest reasons why I like PowerDesk Pro. It’s a file management tool for Windows.

PowerDesk Professional is an easy, fast and smart way to organize and manage your files - digital photos, MP3s, web images, etc. on your PC. PowerDesk Pro gives you more features and functions than the standard Windows file manager with tools to search, edit, delete, copy, move, sort, zip, label, view, and convert your files and data.  In just a few clicks, you can use PowerDesk Pro to completely customize your PC.

PowerDesk 8 Professional completely replaces Windows Explorer with a wide array of File and File Management tools that let you perform many of the functions found on digital cameras or MP3 music players as well as your PC. You can use PowerDesk FTP to view and manage FTP sites as though they were ordinary folders on a local or networked drive. Once you’ve set up your favorite FTP sites, you can connect with them in a single click; and PowerDesk now supports Secure FTP.

Keeping files synchronized between shares is also easier with PowerDesk's Sync Manager.  You can compare and synchronize the contents of any two folders. This is especially useful for work on files that are shared between two computers, it’s also useful for backing up and making archived versions of your files.

You can use its Size Manager to show you where and how the space on each of your drives is being used. PowerDesk also enhances the standard Windows Open and Save dialog boxes by adding a selection list for previously opened files and folders. It also provides a file viewer pane that supports over 150 file formats.  Its Archive Manager easily compresses and expands files from over 30 popular compression formats. You can use it to view archive contents and extract selected files with a simple drag and drop operation. Its File Finder quickly locates forgotten files. You can search by keyword, file type, size, or date range and see the results displayed in a single-line reference.

Pro’s: Powerful, easy to use, Swiss Army knife styled file management utility

Con’s: Expensive for a file manager

Conclusion: PowerDesk Pro is an awesome file management application.  If you have a lot of data to manage and want to move it around or synchronize it between home or office network shares, this is definitely the application to help you do that.  You'd be hard pressed to find a better application.

However at $40USD, the application is a bit expensive, especially when the latest computing trends have us moving away from managing files to consuming content. The newer computing paradigms have us, not worrying so much where a piece of data resides as long as its available and usable.  The OS simply manages the where, leaving the user to concentrate on enjoying the content or file.

The full move to this type of paradigm may take a while on a Windows system but the app would be better priced in today's more modern computing market at half the cost.