I haven’t used Sysinternals Autoruns myself, maybe I should try it. Thanks for the tip

When I need to run Daemon Tools, I double click on the icon before I launch whatever requires it to be running. I don’t let it sit in the tray and boss me around as if it owned the place.

System Tray:
1) Windows Update (…)
2) DAEMON Tools (useful for…legal backups…)
3) X-Fi Mode Changer (nowadays I just use it to change from headphone to speaker mode with a hotkey, when watching TV shows from the computer on my TV)
4) SpeedFan (they don’t need to blow at 100% all the time )
5) uTorrent (for downloading Linux distros and…other stuff)
6) DVD Ghost (for watching all DVDs with my Region 2 reader)
7) Safely Remove Hardware
8) avast! Anti-Virus (2 icons actually)
9) Standard Windows network icon thingy
10) Standard Windows volume control
11) Clock

I use Launchy which at a first glance seems to be a bit more powerful variation on the same theme. Have you tried it?

I tried Launchy, it had install issues or didn’t work on some versions of Windows (I can’t remember which). Slick Run has worked every time.

There’s also commonly the little yellow shield from Windows Update, waiting for me to reboot. This is because I generally go to standby instead of off and I’ll be damned if I’m doing any different just ‘case some snotty yellow shield says otherwise.

Heh. Same here. I don’t reboot the computer. I just lock the screen and walk away and let it go into standby by itself.

That said, at some point I got annoyed by that thing and set up my Windows update to run at like 5am every day. This way if the machine needs to reboot, it will reboot by itself while I’m sleeping and when I need to use it I will simply need to log in.

I primarily use Slick Run on my non Vista / Sever 2008 machines. I try to avoid the mouse as much as possible.

I use Launchy which at a first glance seems to be a bit more powerful variation on the same theme. Have you tried it? Or do you prefer SlickRun for some specific reason?

All my Quick Launch menus contain these basics: Firefox, Notepad++, Thunderbird, and Skype. On my dev machine I have these additional items: Visual Studio, SQL Sever Manager, and Reflector.

Up on there I have shortcuts to My Computer, My Documents, My Videos, My Music, My Pictures and my downloads folder, Firefox, Msn, VLC, Foobar2000, GIMP, uTorrent, SUPER, Alcohol, CloneCD and CloneDVD, Steam, Team Fortress 2, OOo Writer and Calc, MSOffice Word, Excel and Publisher, Notepad, Paint, Paint.net, the Windows Calculator and the Recycle Bin (hooray for horizontal screen space)

Having that, I don’t use the quick-launch bar. My systray is kinda cluttered… I don’t like it hiding the things I use, so I turned off the hide inactive icons thing, this means the one’s I don’t use are also not hidden. So in there we have a VNC server, the default network connection icon, Steam, PeerGuardian, MSN, the “catalyst control” thing from my graphics card, Volume Control, “Safely remove hardware” because Windows thinks my printer is a USB mass storage device, AVG, Flashmute (useful thing that) ATNotes, another audio control thing from my sound card, Logmein’s icon, and a little doodad that keeps my clock synced up to the right time.

There’s also commonly the little yellow shield from Windows Update, waiting for me to reboot. This is because I generally go to standby instead of off and I’ll be damned if I’m doing any different just ‘case some snotty yellow shield says otherwise. Since AVG now requires a reboot after every update (fucking v8, v7 would update fine without a reboot) so that’s normally displaying the “something’s wrong” icon to guilt me into rebooting.

Pinned to my Start Menu I have Firefox, MSN, VLC, Foobar, uTorrent, Notepad, Paint and the Calculator. I like having Notepad/Paint/Calculator on hand for the myriad little simple jobs where a more sophisticated program would be overkill.

So yeah.. that’s all the shortcuts that are a click away on my setup.

Quick launch: Top line: Show desktop, IE, Outlook, Windows media player.
Bottom line: Firefox, Opera and safari.

In the taskbar I have Task manger, Resource Manager, outlook, Opera, RoyalTS (Terminal services), first firefox window, MSN Messenger, WMP, Programmers notepad. The rest is random, there’s some putty, more firefox windows (because I like not having to swich between tabs in firefox, easier just to open a new instance), Word 2007, serveral open emails (recived and writing), some httpheader thingy (Live HTTP headers, a plugin for firefox), VMware management thingy, two IE windows (with serveral tabs open each).

Sysytem tray: Whatpulse, outlook new mail, printer thingy, java runtime, opera icon, network, outlook standard icon, MSN Messenger, sound icon, task manager and another sound icon.

I’d like to consider myself a power user, but I don’t have enough ram to do so

/Mads

My Quick Launch