Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Download Pick: Bayden Slickrun

If you are like me when I am on my PC I like to use shortcuts and get things done as quickly as possible with the least amount of typing. I was searching on some Vista command line commands and happened across a slick.. (literally) FREE program called SlickRun by a company called Bayden Systems.

What SlickRun does is put a small command box above the clock on your system try you can type commands into. The box can be moved anywhere on your screen. While it may not look like much at first, SlickRun is a powerful little free tool worth having a go around with. After you download and install Slickrun you will see a box like the below image:

The power of SlickRun comes in with a feature they call Magic Words. Magic Words allow you to turn any common word into a command that will run a program when you type it into SlickRun command window. So for example you could set up Outlook email to come up if you just typed Mail into Slickrun. Or Internet Explorer to come up if you just typed IE. You can also type create Magic Words for full website urls so say for example you wanted to go to FoxNews web site you could put the url to it into SlickRun and assign the word Fox to it. Typing in Fox would bring up an IE (or FireFox or whatever browser you want of choice) window with the Fox news website.
Say you want to make a quick Magic Word for active directory users and computers. Just pick your magic word, I used ADU and add in the shortcut to the AD users control panel into the setup (%SystemRoot%\system32\dsa.msc), save it and off you go! Typing ADU into the SlickRun command line immediately brings it up!!
One thing I did not like about Slickrun was the sounds it made. There was no choice in the program to disable the sounds but I quickly corrected that problem by going to the program files\SlickRun folder and renaming the 3 .wav files to something else. No more sounds!
You can download the latest version and read more about SlickRun at the following URL: http://www.bayden.com/SlickRun/

While on the Bayden site you will definitely want to check out the many other free utilities they offer at http://www.bayden.com/Other/

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