Aston Shell. Quick facts.

Aston Shell is known to be one of the fastest, most reliable and easy to use Desktop replacement and enhancement products on the market which is confirmed by numerous awards and positive reviews it has received from users, software archives and magazines.

History in brief

Aston Shell was started in the 1998 as a hobby project of two friends, Nick Egorov and Oleg Bulychov, who tried to create a replacement for the MS Office launch bar. At that time they only had access to old Pentrium I computers with a few megabytes of RAM, so resource consumption of every program they used had been critical. After several attempts to find a lightweight analogue to this software they decided to make one from scratch. As time went by, the launchbar has advanced into a complete Desktop replacement application, which let developers save some more resources by complete substitution of Explorer Desktop.

The first version of Aston has been shared with the friends of developers who also worked as testers and requested for some features. When the project has been mature enough someone has suggested making it available to the public and turning into a shareware product. That was the birth of Aston Shell we all know nowadays.

The program was named after Aston Martin, a car manufacturing company, which assembled and tuned each car individually for a certain customer. Just like those elitist cars, Aston Shell lets users create a custom unique Desktop environment, fitting their own needs. Any Aston Shell user can spend some time tweaking the Desktop in order to make it look and work the way he wishes and this process requires no knowledge of shell configuration files or complex system files editing.

The secret of famous Aston speed is relatively simple: it has been written from scratch with the use of highly optimized Win 32 API code and thus it works blazingly fast on any computers, capable of running Windows. It doesn't use code from legacy shells and it's not a form of any other shell. Even today it has no competitors in terms of speed, beauty and reliability.

5 facts about Aston Shell

• Aston is really fast. Actually its core engine has been made to run fluently on Pentium I (or compatible) with at least 16 Mb of RAM. Even the latest versions of Aston can be installed on old computers and work there without any noticeable slowdowns while it would take Explorer shell more time to perform the same tasks. Even today, when computing speed is no longer that critical, many of our consumers use Aston because it gives them an excellent balance between speed and eye candy. Besides, many people use Aston when working with resource-consuming tasks, like 3D rendering, movie encoding, polygraphy, etc...
• Aston is reliable. Explorer crashes are well known to Windows 9X/ME users and if you’re still using one of these OSes you will be surprised how stable Aston is. We’ve also provided it with several tweaks, improving shell’s stability even in the environments with buggy extensions installed. In terms of stability Aston's only competitor is Windows XP shell and no other shell replacement.
• Aston is compatible. We’ve spent a lot of time in order to improve Explorer emulation and make sure all of your programs work fine with Aston. Other shell extensions do not have that good emulation of default Windows shell which causes numerous incompatibility problems. With Aston you can work with your data just as you did it before. Besides, we've made improvements to core shell components, like Taskbar or Desktop in order to give our cunsumers a better experience.
• Aston is customizable. You can tweak any parameter of your Aston Desktop and there is no need to remember complex configuration file structures or dig the depths of system registry. Everything from changing hotkeys or tweaking fonts to creating themes can be done via a simple configuration GUI. You can also add one of the available plugins in order to extend your Aston's functionality even more.
• Aston is beautiful. Sometimes a picture is worth a million words. Just take a look at the, available at our homepage.

Awards, testimonials and reviews:

Tucows, 5/5 cows:
"It's filled with little trinkets that Explorer doesn't offer, and it doesn't take up as many resources".

Download.com, 4.5/5 user rating:
"Instead of a bunch of scruffy icons I have a number of dropdown menus with quick links to any of my applications and to a number of system/control functions. It also really does use fewer system resources than explorer.exe <...> It is quite stable and it has been a long time since I had a 'windows explorer has encountered a problem' type message."
"It made my pc work faster, the memory in use shoots down! <...> It has several plugins, like analog clocks, weather information, cpu monitors etc. Conclusion: It rocks!"
"It takes less time for me to configure it than configuring explorer"

Softpedia, 4.5/5 user rating

A1 Yappee, 5/5 balls staff review:
"Despite the best efforts of Windows themes, there is no better way to smarten-up your desktop than be getting rid of it all together - and this is the way to do it. <...> Undoubtedly a vast improvement over Windows standard, Aston also manages to be fast, smooth and incredibly easy to use, so make the most of your desktop and get it now."

Article in Shell-Shocked

5star-shareware, 5/5 stars.

The Register, 5/5 stars

FreshShare.com, 5/5

BrotherSoft, 5/5 shields.