There are various useful features, such as multi-pane opening and tabbed browsing, as well as quickly filter or sort your files and folders. It's extremely fast too, using multi-threading for faster processing and enabling you to queue and manage operations. This is where Directory Opus really shines – pretty much every aspect of its operation can be tweaked and tuned to suit your needs. Like Total Commander, Directory Opus is as premium file manager – and it shows, and comes a very close second in this list. It has an attractive icon-led interface that's busier than Total Commander's, but can be pared down using the various customization options. Most of these third party file managers can be set to replace Explorer as your default app, though we recommend testing them thoroughly first.

We've rounded up the best alternatives to File Explorer, which will make managing your files faster, easier and more intuitive. This can be especially problematical in the modern age of document management (opens in new tab) and online storage (opens in new tab), when handling multiple files across multiple accounts needs to be managed much more simply and easily.

Once you've started transferring a big chunk of files, there's no way to pause and restart the process, you can't create a new folder without digging into a menu, and forget batch renaming – it's not happening. Transferring files and folders between locations is a cumbersome process that often involves opening two Explorer windows and dragging icons between them. Windows has changed dramatically over the last few years, but File Explorer (formerly known as Windows Explorer) has remained largely untouched and, frankly, it could be improved upon.

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