The old way to launch programs:

1. Click on the Start button.

2. Move the mouse to Programs.

3. If you’re using “Personalized Menus,” some of the Program folders may be hidden, so you have to click or hover on the two little arrows at the bottom of the list.

4. Remember which of your many folders contains the program you’re looking for. You may have to browse multiple folders and subfolders to find it.

5. Finally, once you find it, click on it to launch the program.

Alternatively, if it’s a frequently used program, you can put a shortcut on the desktop. This works fine if your desktop is showing, but if you already have one or more open windows, you first have to minimize those windows before you can click the icons on your desktop. You also have to decide in advance which icons to put on the desktop. Personally, I like to keep my desktop icons to a minimum.

Another alternative would be to create hotkey combinations (eg., Ctrl-Alt-M, Ctrl-Shift-W, etc.) for your frequently used programs. This allows you to launch selected programs without navigating through the Start menu or minimizing open windows to expose the desktop. However, in addition to deciding which programs are worthy of having hotkeys (usually only a small number of programs), you have to remember what all those hotkeys are.

I have come to prefer a specialized application launcher. My current favorite is Find And Run Robot (FARR). Another popular choice is Launchy.

These and similar apps require you to remember ONE hotkey, and it’s one that you will use frequently. You type the hotkey (in my case, Ctrl-Space), and a small window pops up, in which you start typing what you’re looking for. Don’t worry, you won’t have to type much!

In this example, “cha” was all it took for FARR to find the Windows Character Map program (if you’ve never used this, it’s a useful program for inserting special characters like ±, ½, ¿, ©, etc. in your text). Using the Start menu to launch this program requires navigating to Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map. At this point with FARR, all that is left is to hit Enter on the keyboard. (There is no need to finish typing “character map.” You don’t have to select it either; FARR will automatically launch the first result in the list once you hit Enter.)

If Character Map wasn’t what I had in mind, I can keep typing to further refine the results, or if the program I want is further down the list, I can use the arrow keys to select that program and hit Enter to launch it. For example, if I was really looking for Chip’s Challenge, I could hit the down arrow three times, then Enter, and Chip’s Challenge would open. The next time I use FARR to search for something beginning with “cha” FARR remembers that I wanted Chip’s Challenge last time, and this time it automatically comes to the top of the list.

Launchers like FARR and Launchy aren’t just for finding shortcuts in your Start Menu or on your desktop. They can also be configured to find other files on your computer. You can find executable files (*.exe) that don’t have a shortcut in the Start menu. You can find documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, music, internet favorites/bookmarks, etc., and automatically open them with the associated program. For example, instead of opening Microsoft Word, then using the File > Open dialog in Word to search for a file, you can just type the file name in FARR (or Launchy), the open the file in Word all in one step. Or, if you can’t remember whether that file you’re looking for is a Word document, Excel spreadsheet, Powerpoint presentation, or Adobe PDF just start typing the filename and chances are you’ll find it quickly and easily.

Plugins and other advanced options extend the flexibility even further. For example, the “jscalc” plugin for FARR adds a powerful calculator.

All this and more is available at the tip of your fingers. App launchers like FARR and Launchy are especially popular with users who attempt to do as much as possible from the keyboard, minimizing the need to move your hand back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse. (Hint: you need your mouse a lot less than you think; especially if you use Firefox.)

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If you’re looking for a starting point, the author of the site has provided a 49-page “book” that he says, “weaves together most of my favorite ideas on personal finance and a lot of other goodies into one document.” It starts out with a single page covering “Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance,” then explores the basic concepts throughout the other pages.

Click below to get it:

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/onepage/

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http://www.thebiblesite.org/

At the site, click on the button that looks like this:

After clicking the button, you will be thanked “for your donation of one book of the Bible, which will be provided to a persecuted Christian who has never had their own copy of God’s Word.”

http://www.thehungersite.com

At the site, click on the button that looks like this:

After clicking the button, you’ll see that “you have given the value of 1.1 cups of food to the hungry.”

The Hunger Site is part of the GreaterGood Network operated by CharityUSA.com. Visit either site for links to their family of sites that allow you to make no-cost-to-you donations to charities supporting children’s healthcare, literacy, breast cancer prevention, animal rescue, and rainforest preservation.

Related posts:

1. Giving to Beggars Jon Bloom (Executive Director of Desiring God) has recently blogged...

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http://www.spamgourmet.com

There are quite a few varieties of “disposable email addresses.”  spamgourmet happens to be the one that I use, and I find that it works very well.

Here’s an example of how it works:

You want to sign up for that free sample of Chocolumps cereal, but you don’t want your inbox flooded with more “free offers” from everyone and their brother.

Instead of giving the makers of Chocolumps your real email address (realemail@domain.com), you give them a special “made-up” email address: chocolumps.5.keyword@spamgourmet.com.  “Keyword” is your spamgourmet username, and is the same for any address you make up.  “Chocolumps” is a word you make up on the spot when you “create” a disposable email address.  “5″ means that spamgourment will forward up to 5 messages sent to chocolumps.5.keyword@spamgourmet.com to your real email address.  If the makers of Chocolumps keep sending you more email after that, or if they sell/give your email address to someone else, any additional messages get “eaten” by spamgourmet and you never see them.  You can pick a number from 1-20, use a letter of the alphabet, or another word instead of “5.”  For example, “1,” “a,” or “apple” all allow a single email to get through; “4,” “d,” or “dog” will allow four emails to get through; hopefully, you get the picture.

The advantage over other disposable email address programs is that you don’t have to go to a separate website or login to a separate account to get your email; spamgourmet forwards it to your real email address.  You don’t have to go to spamgourmet to configure a disposable email address; you just make it up on the spot (you do have to go to spamgourmet once initially to configure your account).  If you give someone a disposable email address, then decide you want to keep getting email from that source, you can do that too, and you can make it so a particular email address only accepts email from a particular address or a particular domain (for example, allow unlimited emails from generalmills.com to your cheerios.yum.keyword@spamgourmet address, but email to that address from any other source gets eaten).

There are other features and ways to use the service; just go to spamgourmet.com and check it out.  If you are in the habit of signing up for things on the internet, I know you will find this helpful.  Did I mention that it’s free?

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