The Runbox
This is my favorite. Its already an integral part of windows, we are simply making more use of it. Keystroke [Win]+[R] will bring up a box in which you can type in the name of a program. (I've hacked mine to look the way it does below, check out the tutorials here to learn how to do this and more.)

Now, windows already has a set of programs preregistered, some of which you may or may not have encountered before. Type in "notepad" (without the " ") and see how this launches Notepad. Imagine if you just typed in "pad" and this did the same thing- SO much faster, and no mouse involved!

App Paths
Before you can type in the names of programs you'd like, you need to register them as shortcuts first. There are two ways you can do this, either by editing the registry directly (I'll cover this later in part 2), or by using a little program called App Paths. I prefer the latter because its quicker and very easy to use. You can get App Paths here (180kb).

Unzip and run the program. You'll notice "PAD" is what I have set as a shortcut to launch EditPad. Note that what you type into the runbox is NOT case-sensitive. I put my shortcuts in capitals to differentiate the ones I've created from those installed by programs and windows defaults. Double-click on any entry to edit the shortcut name and path. To create a new shortcut, right-click anywhere in the list and select add.

Launching multiple programs at once                 
The title says it all. What if you want to launch several programs at once? We can, by using batch files to do the dirty work for us. I tend to need to do this for different things. For example, whilst designing this website, I have three different browsers and an ftp program open. Instead of calling the runbox four times, I could call it once to launch a batch file which will load the browsers and ftp program for me. You simply create a link to the batch file instead.

Below is a simple batch file I wrote to launch two programs at once:

START d:\colorpad\colorpad.exe

START d:\"paint shop pro 7"\psp.exe

Copy the text above into a text editor and save the file with a .bat extension. I called mine ART.BAT, and placed it in my d:\ directory. (You'll need to change the paths to programs on your computer for this to work.) Now, the START command must precede the file path. I had problems with using the full path to Paint Shop, because the path to the file has spaces in the folder names. There are two ways round this. Notice how I've put commas round the 'offending' folder. The other way is to make a shortcut to the .exe and specify the path to the shortcut instead. Make sure you don't place it somewhere with spaces! I renamed the shortcut from "psp.exe" to "psp", and placed it in the d:\ directory, which made the path d:\psp. Note the lack of file extension because its a shortcut. You can add .LNK to the end of shortcuts in batch files if you wish.

Another thing to note, commands and paths in batch files do not seem to be case-sensitive. Change the paths for programs you'd like to run, save the .bat file and add the .bat file as a shortcut with ShortRun. You can now run the batch file from the runbox.

~Serenity