PC Tips for lauching your favorite application faster

There are several ways to launch apps quickly, using either mouse or keyboard.

Direct method: You can assign keystrokes to launch any shortcut. Right-click the shortcut and choose Properties. On the Shortcut tab, click in the Shortcut key box and then press the keys you want to use to launch the shortcut. Click OK.

A word of warning: Be careful not to reassign other useful keyboard shortcuts you may have already assigned. Also, you can assign keyboard shortcuts only to icon shortcuts — not the actual icon of a document or application.

Search method: In Vista and Win 7, press the Windows key to open the Start menu. Then type a few letters until the search tool finds the program you want to launch; press Enter. The catch — if you have several programs starting with the same characters, you end up taking more time typing than if you simply mouse-clicked the application’s icon.

Menu method: For me, the “classic” Start menu provides a better solution. If you organize shortcuts into a hierarchy of menus, each starting with a unique character, you can navigate the menus quickly and launch most programs with only 3 or 4 keystrokes.

For example, to launch Photoshop (which is on my Start menu’s Images menu), I press the keyboard Windows key and then type I, P (see Figure 1). For Microsoft Excel, I type Win, N, X (Start, Numbers, eXcel). Before long, you’ll know your shortcuts by heart.

To get the classic Start menu in XP or Vista, right-click the Start button and choose Properties. On the Start Menu tab, select Classic Start menu and click OK.

Bonus tip. To avoid having menu items start with the same letter, either rename them or place an ampersand in front of any letter in the name. The character following the ampersand will then act as the shortcut for that item.

Mouse methods: For fast launching using the mouse, put the shortcuts you use most often into the Quick Launch toolbar (or another custom toolbar) on the taskbar. Right-click the taskbar to open its properties; add the Quick Launch toolbar if yours is missing. (Personally, I prefer not to pin shortcuts to the taskbar because it quickly fills with open-program icons.)

If you have Windows 7, you can also “pin” shortcuts to the taskbar. Right-click a running program on the taskbar and choose Pin this program to the task bar to make a launch button stay there.

Open another window (Win 7): To quickly launch another instance of a running program, Shift-click its taskbar button. Not all applications support multiple instances.

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PC Tips for Windows 7 Calculator to Vista

Windows 7 will most likely offer users a pleasant surprise, at least through its redefined interface and the set of redesigned tools it brings. The plain old calculator suffered a beautiful transformation into a more consumer-oriented product capable of serving both more science prone users as well as the average Joe.

As you probably know, the application can be downloaded as a standalone product here, and run from portable devices with no problem at all, as it requires no installation; a double click on the executable will suffice to launch it. It works nicely on Vista but I bet that you’d appreciate complete integration in the operating system so that it would be automatically launched instead of the plain old version of Windows Calculator.

The procedure is actually a matter of gaining full control of the much dreaded, vital file keeper, System32 folder. Normally, you do not have access to modifying the data in it, not even if you run your account in administrator mode or become the administrator by running the command net user administrator /active:Yes in Command Prompt.

But there are plenty of workarounds to this and besides running Take Ownership registry tweaks, or using third-party software such as Unlocker to cut off all the strings to a file and be able to bend it your way, there is also a very easy but pretty dangerous solution. It is a matter of permission that can be fixed from the Properties of the System32 folder.

So get into System32’s properties and access the Security tab. Next click on “Advanced” button in the lower part of the window. Right now you should be in Permissions tab that lists all permission entries and you can safely click on the Edit button. Another Permissions window pops up listing once more the permission entries. Here’s where you get to select the desired user you want to grant full control over System32 folder and edit the security approvals. Simply check the Full control checkbox to gain complete power over the folder. OK everything and that is it.

If all this seems like mumbo jumbo to you and it is too difficult to understand, I’ll translate it for you, with the help of these easy to follow steps:

Select folder > right click > Properties > Security tab > click Advanced > click Edit > select desired user > click Edit > check Full control box > OK > OK > OK > OK

- you will have to wait for a while for the new permissions to be set.

Now that full control over the System32 folder is in your hands, it is time to replace the old Windows Calculator with the fresh Windows 7 one. In my case I made a backup copy of the old app by adding an underscore (“_”) suffix to its name, just in case.

The original files that need to be replaced are calc.exe located in the root of System32 and calc.exe.mui in the “en-US” folder of System32. As mentioned before, I made backups to these, just in case, and I recommend you do the same. If you do this, all it takes to finish the process is copying the files in Windows 7 Calculator archive in the exact places with the original ones.

If all the steps have been followed correctly, Windows 7 Calculator should be the default calculator for your system. And if you took my advice and renamed the original files, you will have access to the old calculator as well by typing the new given name in the Run box (in my case calc_).

Once all this is done I suggest you remove the full control so that no unfortunate accidents take place because System32 is a very sensitive folder for the system. If you can’t remember the previous permissions, in my case they were limited to Traverse folder / execute file, List folder / read data, Read attributes, Read extended attributes and Read permissions. As you probably notice there is no write permission granted so this should be enough hint for you not to mess around with the data.

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