At heart I am a lazy computer user. When I want to do something on the computer, I either use keyboard shortcuts or I use a bookmarklet to achieve it. The last thing I want to do is go clicking around aimlessly for ages and ages……(zzzzz…..)

But as the web has evolved, some bookmarklets have become redundant as their use has become integrated into the web browser. For example, a bookmarklet to subscribe to a RSS feed is no longer necessary because in Firefox, you can now subscribe to a RSS feed by clicking the orange RSS logo in the Firefox URL address bar instead.

One thing that has always been a challenge in Windows XP is keeping track of multiple instances of a program or multiple windows. Even though I work on a high resolution screen which offers plenty of space and a wide taskbar, I often reach a limit upon which I (theoretically) need to scroll through the taskbar to find all open windows.

Now there are a few default Windows XP features to handle multiple instances of a program or even dozens of open windows, and of course there are tools that offer even more comfort.

On my eternal quest for free OS X apps to make my life easier and increase my productivity, I stumbled across a nifty free program called RapidoWrite, released by the software developer app4mac. At first sight, it seemed like a tool that would only make my life more confusing. However after using it for the past week, I came to the conclusion that I could not have been more wrong in my assumption.

Whenever any major motion picture has a “hacker” character, they always show the actor violently typing on their custom interface and causing all kinds of programs to pop up just from their keystrokes. Now, I’m no hacker to be sure, but I do like the ability to access any program or file at the touch of a key. A utility that does just this is called a “launcher” and makes the process of finding and opening things on your computer easier than navigating through a bunch of windows. In the past I have tried Launchy and RocketDock, but neither of them have completely satisfied me.

The problem with having so many removable devices - back-up drives, USB sticks, CD disks, DVD disks and so on is that when you put them into your computer, you then have to go searching in Windows Explorer to see where what drive it is running on so you start it and access it. Lots of clicking around which is not very productive.

I was looking at Lifehacker the other day and they mentioned a tool called Desk Drive which is supposed to solve that problem so I decided to see what it was all about.

Launchy, previously mentioned as a Windows start menu alternative, is a powerful keystroke based launcher for your Windows computer. Using Launchy, you can start programs, view files and folders, access bookmarks and perform other such tasks.

In this post, I’ll talk about how you can use Launchy to stay more productive throughout the day. Trust me, once you get the hang of it, you’ll never touch icons or your start menu again. It just rocks. Before you go about using it, let’s have a look at some basic configuration options that you can alter to make Launchy work better for you.