Personal HotKey is a tiny but useful tool with a single purpose: to launch one of your favourite applications whenever you press the Pause button.

There's no installation required. Just run Personal Hotkey, it'll ask you to choose a program you'd like to launch from the Pause button, and that's just about it. Choose Firefox, say, and you won't have to head for the Start menu, or double-click a shortcut to fire up the browser - just press Pause and it'll appear right away.

How useful this might be is open to question, as Windows already allows you to set up hotkeys for whatever program you want. If you right-click the Firefox shortcut, for instance, select Properties > Shortcut, click in the Shortcut key, press something like Ctrl+Alt+F, and click OK, then the browser will also appear whenever you select that particular key combination.

Still, there's no doubt it's easier to just press Pause; the key is rarely used so it's unlikely to conflict with anything; and although it has to be running in the background, Personal HotKey is fairly light on resources, only using a little more than 5MB RAM (private working set).

1.7 changes:
- Added option to hide tray icon