Fastest way to open an application in Windows 8

We know Windows 8 is still missing the Start button and not sure if Microsoft has any plans to put it back. I don't think so. You can download Windows 8 from your MSDN or TechNet account now. Windows 8 will be available to the public on Oct 26.

Since we are missing the Start button, it makes it difficult to find an application in non-Metro mode. One option is you go to the metro mode, search the application and launch it. But I found that time-consuming option. When I am writing articles, I switch between several applications. So, I write an article in Microsoft Word 2013 and code in Visual Studio 2012. Then I need IrfanView for my image resizing and cropping and I need Notepad to clean up the word text for Web. I do not a direct copy from Word to Web because that adds lots of junk HTML to the article.

I also run a few more programs. For example, I use Expression Blend to create my article's custom images and so on.

So, the faster way I found is to use the command prompt in non-Metro mode. Check out how to open a command prompt in Windows 8.

Let's say, I want to run Notepad, I would WIN+X and select Run (ALT+R) from the command prompt.

In the Run dialog search text box, I type notepad and hit ENTER.

This launches Notepad for me.

In this article, we learned about the Fastest way to open an application in Windows 8.