So I stumbled upon Quicksilver today. The documentation is fairly poor, but it’s a laucher for OSX. The fundamental idea is that you press a hotkey combination and start typing the name of the program as soon as it finds a match, you press enter and it runs. I was skeptical, but people rave about it. So I thought… OK is there a windows equivalent?
Well there is a great open source equivalent — Launchy. Small download, small resource usage and it fits the bill perfectly. Download and try it. I don’t think you will be disappointed. It is much better than trying to navigate the Start Menu with a mouse (especially on a laptop). You’ll soon find it is indispensible (and I’ve just been using it for a few hours!)