After hearing all they hype over Quicksilver (a mac launcher that allows you to travel through time and rule the universe*+) I thought I would have a look at the current crop for windows. I installed slickrun aaaages ago but never really got used to using it. I chose Launchy to evaluate for the time being - its an open-source app that does some of the things Quicksilver does (although Launchy is more of a “noun“ thing where Quicksilver seems more like a “noun verb“ thing). Overall I do find myself more productive with Launchy around, although I wish it would understand URLs and file paths and just open those in firefox/explorer. Adding c:\windows\system32 as one of the directories it indexes, and adding .exe as a type for it to index has added lots of useful tools at very close quarters. Scott Hanselman has a comprehensive review of Launchy and co. here.

* well, if you believe the hype
+ hey, I thought OSX was soooo usable that all this would have been easy anyway