Launchy Buy buy start menu?

[Lazybones]

http://www.launchy.net/

What a great idea.. a popup window that does a live lookup search of your start menu items as you type. Just hit enter and the app launches.. No more digging through the start menu for those apps that you use sometimes, but have to dig around to find when you need them.

[Shayne]

I think i like the quicklaunch bar better then typing

[Lazybones]

I think i like the quicklaunch bar better then typing

That bar is great for the 5 to 10 apps you use all the time, but when you want to start something used less often, it can be a pain to dig through the start menu, particularly if you have installed a bunch of stuff and haven't sorted it in a while.

[Mr. Analog]

I just leave mine alphabetized, mind you I don't think I have a lot of programs in my start menu, as long as I can find Photoshop and CoV I guess I'm fine anyway

[Shayne]

Hmmm...you guys have a lot of @%&# installed

[Mr. Analog]

Hmmm...you guys have a lot of @%&# installed

What can I say I use a lot of stuff... though some games I haven't played for a while can go I guess...

[Tom]

Since we're all sharing... Atached be my menu and "quick launch".

[Darren Dirt]

I've got a folder on my root drive (both at work and home) called "SC". I update my PATH to include it.

Inside "SC" are shortcuts, some .lnk files and some .bat, to my most commonly used programs and webpages.

As an example, I click Start, Run and type IMDB Simpsons and it launches IMDB.bat, which contains:

Code Select Expand


start IEXPLORE "http://www.imdb.com/find?q=%*;s=all"

and which quickly opens the webpage: http://www.imdb.com/find?q=Simpsons;s=all

I have similar .BAT files for Wikipedia, 2 different dictionaries, etc.


And I have a .lnk file for every pretty common app, such as NOTEPAD, WINWORD, PHOTOED, MSPAINT, CHARMAP, CALC, FF (firefox), LN (Lotus Notes), etc. So never need to click anything to launch those.

Makes for ultra-quick launching, and like Mr. Analog I have alphabetized the list of apps for the more rarely used programs.


I recently also through together a custom "start" page for my browsers, just simple text links to my most common sites (e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, RW "recent posts", Weather, Royal Bank login page, etc.)


This is fun, sharing ideas how we try to save time and make using the computer less of a pain...

[Shayne]

Iexplore eh?

[Darren Dirt]

yeah, I'm so ashamed , IEXPLORE.EXE for shortcuts to "quickly-launch, do something, quickly close the browser" type of tasks.

I use IE instead of Firefox cuz it's integrated into Windoze so it launches uber-fast (my work cpu is only PIII, so FF takes about 10-15 seconds first time) and we all know about the FF memory bloat as multiple tabs are opened... I'm seriously thinking of trying out Opera as my less-memory-hog alternative browser, and if it launches quickly it'll be my "shortcuts" browser too, for stuff like IMDB.BAT demonstrated above.