So, if you are anything like me, you hate a cluttered Desktop, because you always think that making a shortcut is "so useful"... Yeah, they're great, until yuo get 500 of them! Then you can't find sh!t! Obviously if you have 500 icons on your desktop, you probably have a good collection of programs to choose from on the Start Menu.

How many of these programs do you actually use? Me? I use about 4 or 5 ALL of the time. But instead of trying to find these 4 or 5 applications in my wilderness of chaos, I simply remember  a few keystrokes. I hit 'CNTRL-ALT-P', and Putty launches, I hit 'CNTRL-ALT-C', I've got a command prompt, so on, and so forth.

Now, you might be asking yourself "Damn, how does he do that, he must be really smart, and have great hacking skills" 

That is not the case, I simply downloaded a great utility called 'AutoHotKey', which you too can get - for FREE! www.autohotkey.com! Just download it,  run the installer, and your almost done. You will have to modify the script, which is a .TXT file. It's pretty self explanatory for those of you who have ever had to write a login script. The following is a sample, which tells the application to launch Notepad after sending CNTRL-ALT-N:

^!n::
IfWinExist Untitled - Notepad
    WinActivate
else
    Run Notepad
return

For those of you who do not see a perfectly clear image of what the above statement says, then RTFM! And it does have a good manual.