image I was addicted to Launchy back on my old Dell latitude D420. It had Windows XP with Launchy. I went through documents in a snap making most of my friends impressed. Anything I could think of, a program or even a document, was exactly 1 second away from the moment I needed it.

Now with my HP Pavilion dv2775ee with Vista Home Premium 64, I wanted the same functionality. I knew about it's "Search" capability in launching applications. But I wanted to open pdf ebooks, documents..etc in the same manner.

How to do it?

  1. Add the locations you would like to find stuff inside among locations to be indexed. Repeat for all your important locations
  2. Next step, change the Start Menu Search results settings
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  3. Now find that important book/document in a snap!!
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Ditch Launchy forever?

Well, No. There are some fundamental differences that I still miss:

  1. Spelling mistakes: If I wrote "frefox" or "ffox", it finds it.
  2. Launching applications by abbreviation: For example "Microsoft Visual Studio 2008" could've been started by writing "VS2008".
  3. Ability to do other stuff
    1. Calculator: (1100*200*1.13)/12 ---> 20716.6667
    2. Command Line: cmd > ping google.com -t ---> Opens command line window with ping google.com -t

Launchy is much "SMARTER", but I am getting used to Window's new method....