phillhutt

So, lately (and you can call me a noob) I’ve started using the Windows Run command a lot more. Or just Win + R (not that noob). I’m starting to see how handy it is. Especially when I’m forced to use laptops with that stupid little pad for the mouse, or even that little joystick thing in the middle. They really start to hurt my hand after a while.

So, I had a quick search for adding commands to the run command. You know, you can type things like mspaint, calc, msconfig etc, and it knows where to find the executable. Well, first page I looked at was this. It has a nice little how-to on how it works (pretty brief) and adding new commands. When I had a look in the registry (shown below) for what commands are already there, I was surprised to find just how many programs put stuff in there. I’m not sure if it is used by anything else, but things like quake3, iTunes and avast anti-virus are in there. Random. Cool thing is you can change them to make them shorter (again, not sure if this will impact anything else, apparently not). Have a look at the site and some of the comments as to where it finds other places to look for shortcuts and what not.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
  SOFTWARE
    Microsoft
      Windows
       CurrentVersion
        App Paths