Finding the proper balance in your power management scheme can be challenging; sometimes you need all the horsepower you can get, while other times battery life is your top priority. If you find yourself regularly navigating to your power management settings as your priorities change, you might benefit from being able to create hotkeys that will instantly switch you to a different power management profile.

A poster at How To Geek outlines how to create a shortcut that will switch your system to a specific power management profile. Once you have the shortcuts you need set up, you can then either set a hotkey in the shortcut itself, or use your favorite hotkey utility to launch each shortcut based on your preferred hotkey.

[Via Lifehacker]

I'm not generally inclined to make use of program launchers. Instead, I prefer to use the tools that are built in to my Windows OS to save mouseclicks and keystrokes.

QOpen, however, is an interesting alternative for me. It's portable, insanely light on memory usage (about 2mb) and incredibly useful on my service bench.

By default, QOpen is invoked by pressing win + space. Once the window is displayed, entering your preferred abbreviation launches the specified application: NP for Notepad, for example. It also supports drag-and-drop creation of new hotkeys from shortcuts or programs, allows you to specify command line arguments and working path, and can launch applications maximized, minimized, or hidden.

When would this be useful? A lot of the systems I repair on the bench require the same applications, which I store either on a network share or on my USB flash drive. By launching QOpen first, I can execute obnoxiously long commands like "c:\windows\system32\oobe\msoobe /a" (to open the Activation Wizard) by typing something simple like "act" into QOpen.

Its size and low resource utilization is key. I still see the odd Windows XP machine with 128 or 256 megs of memory that needs tuning - some people just love their old beaters and don't want to upgrade or replace them. QOpen is a handy, light way to access apps like CCleaner, HijackThis, and Adaware from my file server and it doesn't bog down older machines like Launchy does.

One of our beefs with Windows is that there are some pretty obvious customization options missing. Little things, but things we'd use if they were there. Fortunately, NuonSoft's Shell Enhancer packs a bunch of these features into a single 2.5MB installer.

What can it do? For starters, it allows you to "roll-up" windows (display only the title bar), make any window transparent, minimize applications to the system tray, lock them in position, and even force them remain on top.

It doesn't stop there, however. Also included is a wicked hotkey manager; we particularly like the prepacked "Google selected words." Highlight some text in any window, press ctrl + alt +g, and Internet Explorer will open with your results (you can easily rework it to use Firefox, of course). There's also a thumbnail-enhanced task switcher and a taskbar button mover (it's not click and drag, but it works).

Who doesn't want a little more functionality with a dash of eye candy for their Windows shell?

Apple users love pretty things. And nothing is prettier than getting all arts and crafty and displaying your awesome collection of downloaded apps in a sweet collage. Best of all, no work is involved.

This Mac application called Todos opens all of your application icons in a panel. Choose the application you want to open, and hide the panel. That simple. No more cramming all of your applications on the dock. There is a nice hotkey feature to easily open and hide Todos as well.

We recently went through a phase of showing a number of different application launchers. I thought we were done with that, at least for awhile, until DownloadSquad reader Martin submitted this utility through our tip form. Dubbed simply (and accurately) Hotkeys, this utility is pretty fantastic.

Like most hotkey configuration utilities, Hotkeys allows the user to setup specific key combinations to launch applications, switch between open instances of a running application, control volume (via an add-on) and even remap your Caps Lock key to be a Windows key. But where Hotkeys shines is in how it is configured; setting up a new hotkey is a matter of displaying the on-screen keyboard, and dragging and dropping a shortcut to the key you would like to use to launch it. This in and of itself is pretty great, but they've taken this visual aspect a step further.

One of the reasons most people don't bother to learn hotkeys is that they simply can't remember them long enough to stick into their long-term memory. Hotkeys helps you out with this by simply showing the on-screen keyboard with icons representing each configured hotkey when the user holds down the Windows key for more than 3 seconds. In practice what this means is that when you know the key combination you need, Hotkeys stays out of your way and is very fast. But when you realize you can't remember the key combination, by the time you've decided you need to look for another way to launch the application, the on-screen keyboard has popped up showing you what you needed to know.

Did I mention that the visuals are very appealing? Hotkeys is a product of qliner software, who have decided to release Hotkeys as an open-source project.