Information that are displayed include the shortcut name, file path on the computer system, possible arguments, hotkeys, comments and several other interesting variables. The easiest way to deal with all broken shortcuts is to right-click in the program’s interface to pick the option to select all broken shortcuts. This will check all broken shortcuts giving the user the option to resolve or delete them in one go.

Resolve tries to fix the broken link while delete will remove it from the desktop or start menu right away.

The program offers an option to create an html report that takes into account all or only the selected shortcuts. It is also possible to edit shortcuts. This will open the default Windows properties dialog with options to edit several properties of the selected shortcut.

Shortcuts Man is available for most Windows operating systems at the Nirsoft website.

Other than that, though, Gmail had a ton to offer – integration with my Google Calendar, the ability to send and receive emails from a number of different accounts, and ubiquitous access to my updated email inbox from any computer.

My ultimate solution has been not one or the other, desktop or web-based, but both. Gmail is still my hub for email, but when I’m at my own computer, I’m in Thunderbird, Mozilla’s fantastic and free desktop email client. Thanks to five great add-ons, Thunderbird is able to capture almost all of the features of of Web-based Gmail, and add a couple of capabilities of its own.

Lightning/Provider for Google Calendar

One of the great things about Gmail is that, through Gmail Labs, you can put your calendar right in the sidebar next to your email. Adding and viewing calendar events is easy, and Gmail even tries to guess when someone suggests an event for you by email, and lets you put it automatically in your calendar.

All this can be replicated, and in my opinion improved, by using a couple great Thunderbird add-ons. The first is Lightning, which adds a calendar into Thunderbird, making it more of a personal information manager than just an email client. Then, by installing Provider for Google Calendar, you’ll be able to sync your Lightning calendar back and forth with Google Calendar. That way, it’s always available online, but looks and feels just like a desktop calendar within Thunderbird.

Zindus

Zindus is basically just like Lightning, but for your Google contacts. Zindus automatically syncs your Google contacts with your Thunderbird contacts, and any added or edited contacts are automatically synced to both.

Zindus is great, because it both keeps a backup of your contacts online and off, and because it means you’ve always got your contacts available to you in your application of choice.

Nostalgy

One of the fantastic things about Gmail is how easy it is to plow through your inbox – tons of great keyboard shortcuts and useful buttons let you deal with every email quickly and easily. Nostalgy, a favorite Thunderbird add-on of mine, adds much of the same to Gmail.

Using a few choice keyboard shortcuts, Nostalgy lets you move items between folders, go to folders, show and hide messages and folders, and even search through your email. You can create your own rules and scripts, to be executed by triggers in the email itself, or by a given keystroke. With Nostalgy, you can go through your Thunderbird inbox every bit as fast as in Gmail.

GmailUI

GmailUI is much like Nostalgy, in that it adds some of what makes Gmail so great into Thunderbird – the navigation shortcuts. For instance, GmailUI makes it easy to archive email in a single keystroke – which is notably missing in the normal Thunderbird interface.

GmailUI also creates shortcuts to move between messages, search in one click, and even improve Thunderbird’s ability to search using things like “to:David Pierce” to find what you’re looking for even faster.

Signature Switch

As I mentioned at the beginning, one of my favorite things about Gmail is that it handles multiple identities well – I can use personal, work, and blogging email seamlessly all within Gmail. Using a Thunderbird extension called Signature Switch, and a little known feature within Thunderbird itself, Thunderbird does the multiple identity thing even better.

First, go to “Tools”,”Account Settings” within Thunderbird. On the right side of that window, click “Manage Identities.” There you can add as many other emails as you want – Thunderbird lets you send emails from a number of different addresses, all within the same account.

The Signature Switch extension lets you create a number of different signatures for your emails, and then insert whichever one you want into your emails. It’s a simple extension, but actually handles multiple signatures for multiple addresses better than Gmail itself.

There’s something special about a desktop email application for me – I like the reading pane, I like the look and feel of the apps. The ubiquity of Web email, though, can’t be ignored. Using these extensions, I get the best of both worlds – all the goodness of Gmail in Thunderbird, and all my email and data is up-to-date in Gmail when I’m away from my computer.

What do you use for email? Thunderbird, Gmail, something else?

The question here is obviously if this is enough to justify running yet another background program 24/7 on the computer system. This really depends on the user in question. If you regularly add and remove removable devices and media from a computer system – talking about multiple times a day at least – then you might want to consider using the software. If you only do it once a week the software program feels like an overkill.

The feature can be enabled for CD Rom drives, removable media, fixed drives, network drives and ram drives. The application will sit quietly in the Windows System Tray and spawn a desktop shortcut immediately after one of the selected devices has been connected to the computer system. It will also remove the shortcut again if the device is disconnected from the system.

Desk Drive requires the Microsoft .net Framework and uses up to 18 Megabytes of computer memory while running. That’s a lot of memory and it should influence the decision whether to run Desk Drive or not heavily.

One of the biggest strengths of the application is the wide variety of possible actions that can be defined. It ranges from running applications, entering text, manipulating windows, changing system settings like the volume of the system. Hoekey supports multimedia keyboard keys and can control media playback on the computer system as well.

Probably the most amazing factor of this keyboard shortcuts program is its low resource usage. Once everything has been configured the application runs quietly in the background. It uses 200 Kilobytes of computer memory while running and 600 Kilobytes of virtual memory. That’s nothing compared to most other applications that allow the manipulation of keyboard shortcuts on the Windows operating system.

Orphans Remover is the solution for the problem. The software program was specifically designed to deal with Windows shortcuts. It is possible to scan predefined locations on the computer for invalid windows shortcuts or pick folders or drives manually that should be scanned for orphaned shortcuts.

Default locations are the Windows Startmenu, the computer desktop, the favorites and history, recent documents, program files and application data folders. Shortcuts pointing to removable or network drives, cd-roms and ram disks can be exempted from the search.

The software will scan the drive which does not take more than a few seconds. All invalid Windows shortcuts will be displayed and the user has the option to delete all or only some of them. Orphans Remover is a handy software program that effectively locates and deletes invalid Windows shortcuts.

Winlaunch can obviously do more than that. It is a very versatile shortcut application that can create a shortcut for almost anything that you can think of. Adding strings is easily done by clicking on the Add Shortcut button in the main program interface and selecting String from the available choices.

The program asks for a specific text string in the next step and a name for that string. To add an email address simply add it to the text string field and use email for the name of the shortcut. After that select a shortcut key or combination for that new string shortcut, for example F8.

Activate the Winlaunch engine which will enable the shortcut and F8 will from now on paste the email into every text field that is active. This can be helpful for users who have to enter the same data over and over again into text fields. I remember that we used some pretty basic application in my old job to fill a database with information and some of the information was always the same. This would have helped a lot back then, but then again IT would have never allowed the program to be run in the secure environment.

You should make sure that the shortcuts are not reserved by Windows. It is probably safer to use a combination like SHIFT + F-keys instead of just a single key to add string shortcuts.

Shortcuts can be added by using an easy to understand wizard or by importing a list of previously created shortcuts into Winlauch. The user has to define the shortcut type in the first screen, a program, internet shortcut or custom command for example. The next window defines the selected type further. A program could be selected from a list of programs that are currently running on the system or by selecting an executable file on the hard drive.

The final screen configures the shortcut key and the state of the window or application that will be started by pressing it. A state could be hidden, minimized or normal. The real novelty is that single keys can be assigned. This means that a user could configure the F12 key to open Thunderbird and F11 to open Firefox.

The existing shortcuts are displayed in a well arranged manner. Winlauch uses some sort of learn mode to find out if shortcuts from other applications are interfering with the user created shortcuts. Exceptions can also be added manually. For instance pressing F11 will enable full screen mode in all browsers. Adding applications to the list of exceptions will disable all shortcuts when those applications are focused.

Back to my initial need to use the F-keys and other single keys as shortcuts. Winlaunch provides the option to set any key as a shortcut, no matter if it is a single key or key combination. This unfortunately means that some keys will have double functions. F1 would open the Help and a program selected. I really hope Microsoft will add more flexibility to Windows 7 once it comes out, I really cannot see a reason to keep F1 as the help key since I never use the help.

The application that I recommend for this operation is called Short Run. When executed it lists all currently available shortcuts even those of applications that have been uninstalled from the system. As you can see in the screenshot below entries pointing to uninstalled applications are represented with a exclamation mark.

A good way to start would be to remove all invalid shortcuts from the system. Just mark the shortcuts with the left mouse button and hold the CTRL key during that time to mark all at once. Pressing DEL will remove all selected entries from the system.

Far more interesting than removing invalid shortcuts is to add new shortcuts. Pressing CTRL A will open the menu where new shortcuts can be added. The Shortcut Name will be the name that you can enter in the run box after adding the shortcut. The file / folder form field contains the path to the file or folder that you want to open and the Optional Parameters field takes any optional program parameters.

Existing shortcuts can be edited as well. If you think that the shortcut name Thunderbird is to long you can edit it to “t”, “mail” or whatever else you like. The changes take effect immediately. Oh, and you can bring the Run Box to the front by pressing [Windows R].

I’m going to show you how you can create such icons and shortcuts by yourself. I’m using an icon as an example that will have options to load all installed browsers on the system. You do need the software SCCU [via Neowin Forum] for that. Four default icons are shown when the tool is started for the first time, they are Computer, Control Panel, My Documents and Network Places. It is possible to edit the options of those items or create a new one.

Select File > New to create a new icon and click on the New button next to Class Name. Make sure you pick something unique, I did pick Browser for this example. Clicking on Accept should display Browser in the left pane, click Finished to finish this process. Now begins the fun part of the process.

It is possible to change the icon for that newly created icon by clicking on the folder symbol next to Class Icon.

A click on the Class Type tab lets you choose the location and type of the icon. Possible locations are Desktop, My Computer, Control Panel, Entire Network, Network Places and No Namespace. There are five types of icon available for you to choose from, they are: Icon, Folder, Shortcut, Shell Object and Existing Folder. My decision was to place a textless icon on the Desktop.

The final tab called Menu Item lets you drag and drop shortcuts and files to it which are then added to the context menu of the Browser icon. The form fields will be filled out automatically when a file or shortcut is dropped in the menu. The first dropped file or shortcut will the default left-click action for that icon.

I have added three browser to the right-click menu of the icon. All that is left to do is to click on the Class > Merge option in the menu which immediately creates the file on the desktop. If you can’t see it refresh your desktop.

That was just a pretty basic example but it used all the important elements to create textless icons with an enhanced context menu. You should save the new icon finally, otherwise it will be saved in untitled.ini. This file is important in case you want to delete the icon again from the location that you placed it in because a normal delete operation is not working.

I recently discovered Qliner Hotkeys which is in my opinion close to perfect. The real advantage of Qliner Hotkeys is that it displays a graphical keyboard of all hotkeys currently in place. Users can drag and drop softwares around and browse their system for applications to add to spare keys.

All hotkeys use the Windows key plus another key on the keyboard which means that you always press two keys to start the applications. Qliner Hotkeys has about 20 hotkeys already in place after installation. Most start default Windows applications like Notepad, Wordpad or the Internet Explorer.

Those hotkeys can be moved around as well or deleted if the user does not need them at all. To open Notepad the user would press Windows + N for instance. If Notepad would already be open on the system it would be brought to the front as the active window instead.

I have assigned the softwares that I use most – Firefox, Thunderbird, Opera, FTP, Putty and WinSCP3 – to the F1-F12 hotkeys. The overlay keyboard that is used to display the hotkeys can be activated by pressing the Windows key for five seconds. Pressing Windows + Z toggles the keyboard so that you can drag and drop everything you want to assign new hotkeys.

It is even possible to add URLS as hotkeys. This means that you can add your favorite websites as hotkeys to access them even faster than before.

On the downside: Qliner Hotkeys uses roughly 35 Megabytes of RAM. Not a problem if you have plenty of it but computers with only 512 Megabyte of RAM or less will probably have difficulties using the software.

Read More:

Qliner Hotkeys

We are going to remove the arrow of the shortcuts icons first. Hit Windows + R and type regedit. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\LNKFILE and delete the entry IsShortcut in the left pane. Next do the same at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\PIFFILE, et voila the arrow is gone.

Making the desktop icons transparent is far easier. We are going to use the freeware Iconoid to do this. Start Iconoid after installation and click on disable drop shadows in the color tab if that button is available. The default setting is that the icon background is transparent which is exactly what we want. You might need to change the default text color as well if you are using backgrounds that have a similar color than the default font color.

Clavier is a freeware that extends the ability of keyboard shortcuts in windows xp. You are free to use almost any key for the shortcut including the windows key. The interface is pretty straightforward – it displays a list of all current keywords with their shortcuts. To add a new keyboard shortcut you simply click on the + symbol below the shortcut list and select either a program from the start menu, internet favorites (IE only), a special char, a folder, a text that you want written, a program to launch or display website.

• Program: Select a program from your start menu that you want to open with the keyboard shortcut.
• Internet Favorite: Select a favorite that shall be loaded into the current browser with this shortcut. Favorites are imported from Internet Explorer only.
• Special Char: Display a special char with this shortcut.
• Open Folder: Use the keyboard shortcut to open the selected folder.
• Write Text: Write a text and create a shortcut out of it. You could for instance create a pc wide shortcut for your email address, a signature or even a letter.
• Launch a Program: This launches a program from the destination that you select. Many programs are not available in the start menu, that is why this option exists.
• Display a Website: This is similar to the Internet Favorite shortcut. The difference is that you specify the url by yourself with display a website.

Clavier has a built in autostart option which should be activated if you want to use it on a regular basis. It currently supports two languages: English and French. It is Open Source and does not have to be installed on the system if you download and unpack the version without installer from the authors website.