Thursday, December 13, 2007

The One Thing I Like About Vista

I've recently bought a new computer with Vista on it. I was very excited to get this new machine with way better specs than my previous machine. I was also excited to see Vista. So I turned on the machine and was quickly disappointed to note that my new "faster" machine ran a littler slower than my old machine. I also noticed some other things that didn't quite run right. So I wiped my drives and put Ubuntu on it. My wife wants windows back so I'm going to put XP back on the new machine and hopefully see the speed that I was expecting.

The one thing that I really liked about Vista was the Start Menu Search Box. This search box allowed me to type in a portion of the name of the program that I wanted to run and it would start it for me. For example, typing "fire" would start up my FireFox browser. It was really convenient.

I was thinking about this and thought, "Why not find a thirdy party app that can do this for me in XP?!" So I did and I found Launchy. It is a free tool that indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes. It makes it very easy for me to quickly find all of my applications. You can set which folders are indexed which keeps too many bad results from showing up.

I found some other similar apps and I liked that this one did not mess with the current Start menu. I like the XP Start menu and don't want it to be replaced.

Check it out: http://www.launchy.net/