Shaun Harrington has come to my rescue with his excellent product called SmartStartMenu. It’s main function is to give you a toolbar that allows you search all your programs. You can customize where it looks and how it behaves. I have mine search my desktop, my Start Menu, and a couple of other directories.

To use it, you just type some letters and it displays all the items that contain that text. On my system typing “Visual” brings up a list like this:

I use the option that highlights the most recently used item. It is so fast and easy to use. If you have a lot of stuff in your program menu or on your desktop then this utility will save you tons of time.

If that was all it did it would still be great, but it has a few other tricks. If you used the Send To option in Windows 95 PowerToys, then you’ll like that SmartStartMenu will add “Copy Pathname” and “Copy Short Pathname” to your explorer context menu. SmartStartMenu can be used as a replacement for the Run dialog. It is also easy to quickly navigate your folder structure on your hard disks.

Shaun doesn’t ask for any money for this utility. He does have a link that let’s you buy him a beer. So try it out and buy him a beer.

http://www.planetharrington.com/products/smartstartmenu/