Gallery: Access your favourite programs fast

Winkey was developed by Copernic, a software company that has gone on to other things and no longer has the desire to distribute it, but it is still available as freeware on many download sites such as Softpedia. To download it from there, type http://tinyurl.com/348cfv into the address line of your browser and press Enter. When the site opens, click the red Download button and then select External Mirror 1 or External Mirror 2 to download the file, choosing to save it on to the Windows Desktop. Close the Download dialogue box and then close the web browser.

Double-click the Winkey file on the Windows Desktop. If you see a Security Warning regarding an unknown publisher, tell Windows that the program is safe by clicking the Run button. Click Yes to continue, and then wait patiently for the installation wizard to kick in. Accept all its default settings and before long you’ll be looking at the Winkey control panel, which lists the 15 key combinations shown here. Each one can be changed or reassigned to different keys.

To practise assigning a program to a shortcut key, try setting up a shortcut to the Windows Calculator. This resides in the folder C:\Windows\System32 and is called calc.exe. For future reference, any program’s filename and location can be discovered by locating it in the Start menu and right-clicking its entry. Select Properties from the context menu, and when the Properties dialogue box is displayed the program’s filename can be found in the Target pane and its home folder in the ‘Start in’ pane.

In the Winkey control panel, click the Add button to display the Shortcut Properties box. In the Command pane type the full ‘path’ to the target program, which in this case is C:\Windows\System32\calc.exe. Get the path right and you’ll see the icon for the program is displayed beneath the Shortcut tab. For complicated paths that are harder to type, click the document icon immediately to the right of the Command pane and browse for the file on the hard disk.

Choose the key combination to which the Calculator should be assigned by clicking the down pointing arrow on the right of the Shortcut key pane. A list drops down displaying all the possible key combinations. These include the Windows key plus any letter, number or function key (apart from F1), and there are many other more esoteric combinations, some of them involving Shift and Ctrl. Choose Windows key and C and then click OK. Dismiss the warning that the key is already assigned for another purpose by clicking Yes.

That’s all there is to it. The Calculator can now be summoned at any time, from within any program, by holding down a Windows key and tapping the C key. To use Winkey as a way of starting Control Panel applications, look in the C:\Windows\System32 folder for files designated as Control Panel extensions (they all end in .cpl) and use these instead of program filenames. For example, use C:\Windows\System32\ mmsys.cpl for Sound and Audio Properties. To find out what the .cpl files do, just double-click them. Some, such as Firewall.cpl and Timedate.cpl are obvious, but others are more cryptic.

That’s all there is to it. The Calculator can now be summoned at any time, from within any program, by holding down a Windows key and tapping the C key. To use Winkey as a way of starting Control Panel applications, look in the C:\Windows\System32 folder for files designated as Control Panel extensions (they all end in .cpl) and use these instead of program filenames. For example, use C:\Windows\System32\ mmsys.cpl for Sound and Audio Properties. To find out what the .cpl files do, just double-click them. Some, such as Firewall.cpl and Timedate.cpl are obvious, but others are more cryptic.