Why whould I want more than my favourite shell on CD ?

There are various shells available for BartPE. They all have their advantages but they also ALL have their weak points.

You can simply use your primary "full shell" (XPE explorer) or your "alternative lean shell", depending on the concrete recovery scenario you are faced with in a particular recovery session. ReatogoLogon lets you pick a shell during boot or later switch shells.

NOTE:  For computers like a "P3 with 256 Mb ram" or better, you don´t need all this. (Might still be fun playing with it, though!)

 "P3 256 Mb ram" is not the absolute minimum configuration for XPE. It is just the suggested practical minimum. Below this, it may still work ok but you should consider using your alternative shell for crisper response. For more info about how to overcome boot limitations, look under "Boot Profiles"

Some background info on shells:

XPE - Explorer (Sherpya´s great plugin for XP functionality in BartPE)

... is the default shell used in Reatogo-X-PE. It comes closest to the real XP environment and offers most functionality of the real operating system.

XPE will even support some plugins that will not run in "lean" shells because they have files or certain shell functions missing.

If you are using XP on your normal system, your will instantly feel at home and know where to find everything when you are booted with your Reatogo recovery CD.

Basically any modern computer (like a P3 with 256 Mb ram) that is well capable to run the real XP will boot just fine from your Recovery CD with this shell.

My personal advice: If you have such a computer or better, you´ll find that there is really no reason at all to mess with the lean "compromize shells" and that the normal Reatogo-X-PE works perfect the way it is. In critcal  cases you just use ReatogoLogon and a suitable boot profile to boot those old boxes as well.

Nu2Menu (Bart´s original shell)

... comes with the BartPE setup as you get it from Bart´s Nu2-Site. It has been around since Bart started his BartPE and many users (including UBCD4Win) still use it today.

The original Nu2Menu as Bart offers it is a lean and functional shell. The main advantage is that it uses less memory and computing power and therefore can be used on older, low resource computers. It won´t boot every box, though. But the limit is certainly lower than it is for XPE. However, once you try to enhance it with all those functions that are already natively supported by XPE, you end up with something that isn´t really lean anymore.

In essence:

In Reatogo, the typical usage of Nu2Menu whould be as a secondary shell in its original lean form.

... if you want it plain, lean and simple, use the plain Nu2Menu shell as it is and live with the limitations.

If you want a desktop, a taskbar and many other XP native functions, use XPE-Explorer as your shell.

Other Shells

... they´ll be somewhere in between. BBlean (screenshot) for example is a really nice and lean shell.

BBlean is used in the pre-configured (low ram) boot profile no. 1

But they are all worth a try. Just check them out.