Wednesday 23 January 2013

Breadcrumbs in WinXP

I've been using Windows 7 for over a year now on my home and my work pc. It certainly is a big step in terms of usability from Windows XP. Everything is more fluid, stable and easier to do. I can't recall having any BSOD's during my usage of Windows 7, or any system lockups at all. The only real problem I had was getting a driver for a 10 year old scanner, but since it is that old I can't really expect it to be supported. It was time for a newer and better scanner in any case. Overall I am very pleased with Windows 7 besides that.

Recently though I had to go back to use XP for a certain application which is not compatible with Win7. Compatibility mode gave me no results, so I fired up my old XP virtual machine to get the software working.
I wonder if 20 years from now we are going to have to run multiple virtual machines, in order to support the comparability of various different applications released over the years? A strange thought...
Anyway one major point of irritation that comes from using XP is the lack of breadcrumbs in the explorer window. Since I was going through a lot of files at the time, it became a bit more time consuming than I would have like. The way it is done in Win7 is great, so I wondered if someone else had perhaps done something similar for XP. And then I came across Explorer Breadcrumbs.
This nifty little utility adds a toolbar to your explorer window, which enables you to navigate to any of your sub folders in one click. I'll admit it isn't a very pretty design, but the functionality is there, so who am I to complain? The install is fairly painless, and all you need to do afterwards is to unlock your toolbar (done by right clicking next to the explorer icons), and then you can utilize your new plugin.
Sadly this program is no longer supported - even the website is now owned by someone else, so I can't even give you a link to the program. It was donateware so I would have donated a few dollars to the developer had I known who he was.
I think I got my copy off Softpedia, but it shouldn't be too tough to find. Apparently there are other programs that can add this functionality to XP's explorer, however those were paid ones so I'm not going to test them out.
I'll give this 7/10 overall, 10/10 for flawless functionality and a low memory footprint, and 5/10 for the rather bland design.


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