Just finished reformatting my harddrive, and installed Windows 2003 Server+SP1 as my OS. Primarily to take advantage of Win2K3's superior memory management and security, not to mention stability compared to WinXp+SP2. I have been salivating with the newer tech(NET 3.0, Virtual Server 2005 R2, etc.) and although I have been toying with these in my virtual machine, I felt constrained by the VM itself, so I've decided to use OS w/c supports it natively hence the reasons above.
I have made an application checklist that were present in my previous setup, and decided to install one a time. I have heard of
Launchy before, but I've been using
SlickRun for some time now, you've seen one program launcher you've seen em all, I said. Out of curiosity though, I decided to install Launchy which already reached 1.0 milestone, and boy was I glad I did. Instead of configuring applications to have a magic word like
SlickRun, it uses all the items in your Start menu as a lookup. It's like a searchable Startmenu ala Vista, but more prettier. It's default look-up directory is the Start Menu directory, and indexes all shortcut files(.lnk) for faster searching, you can configure also to add several lookup directories and include exe files or whatever files for lookup.
The only minor(minute) gripe is that I couldn't create a mnemonic for the application ala magic word in
SlickRun. So instead of "vs.net" I'd have to type "Visual Studio 2005" to get to the application, maybe it can be done in the future. The default launch key of
Launchy is ALT+SPACE, which is basically the same as the system menu, so I changed it to WIN + Q in memory of
SlickRun :)