When Microsoft moved away from its two pane file manager with the advent of Windows 95, I was one of those who thought it a retrograde step. While two Windows Explorer instances can be tiled on a desktop, the old two pane paradigm still has its uses and there are third party purveyors of such things. Salamander from ALTAP is one such option as is SpeedProject‘s SpeedCommander. I have been using the latter for most of a year now and I would gladly pay for it but for the fact that SpeedProject’s payment system isn’t working. It’s just as well that the demo continues to function fully following expiry of its evaluation period. It even takes the twin pane paradigm further by adding sub-panes within each of these but that isn’t all to this major update to the Norton Commander concept. Recently, I downloaded the free version of Salamander to take a look and, though basic, it does a lot of what I ask of it so I might continue to see how it performs and may even evaluate the commercial version to see how it goes.