Most PC keyboards these days have that little weird key between the left Control and Alt keys. See it?

Yes, the one with the Microsoft Windows logo on it. If you've never used it before, then you've ignored the Hidden Power of Productivity. Pressing this key is the equivalent of prodding Windows with a hot iron - the OS jumps to attention.

Now that you recognize its existence...

The Golden Rule states that if you drag that mouse cursor to the Start button each time you want to access your menu, then you immediately qualify for the N00b Sucker Award. That's because only slow-pokes who drive slow in the fast lane do this.

If you press the Windows key, the root of the Start menu appears. Now shift your eyes towards the right side of the keyboard and you'll notice the arrow keys. Pressing up, left, right, up, up, down, etc. will allow you to scroll through the menu and get exactly on target with your menu selection.

Sometimes you'll notice that certain menu selections have one of the letters underscored in their names. Pressing that will take you directly to it. For example, in Windows XP if you press the Windows key to bring up the Start menu and then press R, it'll automatically take you to the Run dialog:

Wasn't that easy? And if there is more than one menu item starting with the same letter, you can press that letter multiple times to "scroll" between them. Hitting enter simply launches your selection.

And if your Start menu is set up in classic style, you can flow through the menu listing without touching the mouse a single time.

Speaking of the classic Start menu, one of my personal pet peeves is the existence of Personalized menus where selections which are seldom used are hidden from you. If you have a looooong list of menu items, this can be helpful but at the same time it's very easy to forget that they exist. You can disable it in XP and Vista under the customization dialog:

Almost all applications that you run within Windows conforms to using a set of common shortcut keys that allow you to manually bypass the need to go to the application's menu to invoke a particular action with the mouse. For example, many applications have the function to open a file so you can work on it. Instead of dragging that mouse pointer to the File menu to have it drop down so you can highlight and click on "Open," why not just press Control + O (hold down Control and press O)?

Same thing for printing. You can just press Control + P.

Sometimes you want to close the application window but you're too tired to drag the mouse to do File » Exit or drag the pointer aaaaaaaaall the way to the top-right to hit that "X" button. Press Alt + F4 instead.

And then there are times when you have all these windows open and it's driving you insane. Browser windows, chat windows, word processing windows... Windows everywhere! Clear the insanity and temporarily minimize everything down to the taskbar by pressing Control + M. If you do this by accident, then do the same thing but also hold down Shift at the same time to restore everything.

Getting back to security, we all need to lock the workstation sometimes. By that I mean blank everything out to the background and set it so you can walk away for an iced latte a few doors down at the name-brand coffee shop that provides you with green straws. When your desktop is locked, the screen shows a password field implying that to get back into your desktop environment, you have to provide credentials. This is handy when you're looking at incriminating photos of some kind and you want to prevent anyone from seeing what you've been staring at. Ahem. Just press the Windows key + L.

And there's a lot more. Reference Microsoft's Windows Help and How-to article on Keyboard shortcuts.

So let's imagine that you're a productive individual, or at least want to look like one. You're a power user, you multi-task, you have twelve application windows open simultaneously. It really helps if you had a 60" monitor to see everything at once, but most people in the world don't have this luxury. But while you're waiting for the spreadsheet to crunch the numbers, you need to switch over to the web browser to check on your eBay auctions. Do you reach for your mouse and drag the pointer to the taskbar?

Of course not!

While holding down the Alt key, tap the Tab key. In the center of the screen you'll see an icon-based list of your running applications. Tapping on the Tab key while holding Alt down allows you to scroll through them (hold down Shift also to scroll in reverse), and whenever you get the right window highlighted, let go of the Alt key and you've switched over to that app window. Convenient, isn't it? It's also handy when the boss comes walking near your cube and you have to quickly go back to your spreadsheet.

Don't be a sucker - do it fast by Alt-Tabbing over.

If you're using Windows Vista or 7 and you have Aero enabled, you can do the 3D scroll by holding down the Windows key and tapping on Tab. To do the reverse 3D scroll, hold down Shift as well. But keep in mind that only trendy-GUI types do this to show-off. The same type of folks who show off their new cell phones while wearing a shiny Bluetooth headset.

There's an implied test every time someone boots their Windows machine and gets presented with the username / password dialog window. The losers always go for their trackpad or mouse and drag the pointer to one of the fields.

FAILED.

In such situations, many times (whether in the logon dialog or browser web forms, etc.), the username or password field is already blinking, meaning it's highlighted and all you have to do is type in the necessary value. There's no need to type in the username and then drag the mouse to the password field. After you finish typing in the first field, you press Tab and that shifts the blinking cursor to the next field. One click. One key. No mouse. Easy as pie. Sweet as cake. And fast.

If you're in a life-or-death situation and things have to be done extremely quickly, you increase your chances of survival just by remembering the Tab key. In the event that one day you become an FBI agent who has to dismantle a bomb that's about to explode and the only way to disable it is to log into an interface before the clock reaches zero, you'll be thankful for this knowledge. We've all seen it in the movies. It can happen to you.

Then there are cases where you have a dialog box with fields and buttons. Simply pressing tab a number of times allows you to scroll the highlight through these fields. And what do you do when you have the right thing highlighted, like the "Ok" button? Press space. Done. Your mouse is lonely.

Are you one of those people that, when needing to rename a file, you right-click on the file and select Rename from the menu? If you're competing with your roommate on this particular task, you can beat him to the punch by simply hitting F2 after highlighting the file. That right-clicking stuff is so twentieth century...

If there's one line I hear all the time in tech-support talk, it's this:

"Go to the xyz icon, right-click on it, and select Properties."

Screw that. Let me just highlight the icon and press Alt + Enter. Done. If you want to right-click for no other reason than to right-click, you can press the right-click key on the keyboard:

or you can also press Shift + F10. This getting to "Properties" is usually needed when you want to see the information via My Computer or My Network Places. If that's what you want, all you have to do is go to the Run line (remember - Windows key + R) and type in sysdm.cpl or ncpa.cpl, respectively. Boom, instantaneous transport.

Be a man. Leave that mouse where it is.

Are you one of those slow-pokes who, when a long text document is open and you have to scroll up or down to get to the next page, instinctively places your mouse cursor over the scroll bar's arrow buttons? And then you tap tap tap while the screen incrementally shifts the page up or down as you crawl through blobs of text?

Stop it. You're doing it wrong.

There's a reason why the Page Up and Page Down keys exist. Instead of inching to the next page, take a giant leap with one key. Yes, it's amazing when one gentle impact against the keyboard can instrumentally cause you to become productive. Do this enough and you won't reach retirement for a long, long time.

When you're managing your computer, you occasionally need to do odd things like start or stop a service, look at your certificates store, edit the system security policy, or do disk management stuff. Most people will guide you in the direction of, "Right-click My Computer and select Manage" or something equally lame.

I dare you ... DARE you to memorize these direct routes and save precious seconds of your life! Simply going to the Run dialog (or in Vista and 7 just typing these in the search bar) will allow you to directly bypass the root Control Panel screen from which you normally have to follow some troublesome path to get to the config screen where salvation awaits.

If you can't wait to get to the mountain, have the mountain come to you. Here are some direct management consoles that'll take you places in a snap from the Run line:

Miscellaneous system administration consoles (some may apply only for a specific version of Windows):

- Certificates: certmgr.msc
- Computer Management: compmgmt.msc
- Device Management: devmgmt.msc
- Disk Defragmenter: dfrg.msc
- Disk Management: diskmgmt.msc
- Event Viewer: eventvwr.msc
- Group Policy Editor: gpedit.msc
- Indexing Service: ciadv.msc
- Local Security Policy: secpol.msc
- Local Users and Groups: lusrmgr.msc
- Performance Monitor: perfmon.msc
- Print Management: printmanagement.msc
- Removable Storage: ntmsmgr.msc
- Removable Storage Operator Requests: ntmsoprq.msc
- Resultant Set of Policy: rsop.msc
- Service: services.msc
- Shared Folders: fsmgmt.msc
- Windows Management Instrumentation: wmimgmt.msc

Miscellaneous Control Panel applets (some may apply only for a specific version of Windows):

- Accessibility Options: access.cpl
- Add or Remove Programs: appwiz.cpl
- Add Hardware Wizard: hdwwiz.cpl
- Automatic Updates: wuaucpl.cpl
- Display Properties: desk.cpl
- Internet Explorer Options: inetcpl.cpl
- Game Controllers: joy.cpl
- Mouse Properties: main.cpl
- Network Connections: ncpa.cpl
- ODBC Data Source Administrator: odbccp32.cpl
- Phone and Modem Options: telephon.cpl
- Power Options Properties: powercfg.cpl
- Regional and Language Options: intl.cpl
- Sounds and Audio Devices Properties: mmsys.cpl
- System Properties: sysdm.cpl
- Time and Date Properties: timedate.cpl
- User Accounts: nusrmgr.cpl
- Windows Firewall: firewall.cpl
- Windows Security Center: wscui.cpl
- Wireless Network Setup Wizard: netsetup.cpl

By this point, you should have a general idea about using the keyboard to get things done faster. Your telepathic mind should be reaching to hit F5 or Control + R to refresh a web page, Control + D to highlight the URL address bar when you want to type in a new web address, and if you're using Firefox, pressing Control + K to instantly go to the search engine bar.

To scroll down in a page, hit Space or Page Down. Backspace to go back a page. You can also go forward and backward in history by holding down Alt and pressing either the left or right arrow keys.

More from Microsoft on Internet Explorer: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306832

More from Mozilla on Firefox: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard+shortcuts

Windows Explorer comes with some amazingly inefficient defaults, all with the express purpose of trying to keep things looking pretty. You don't need files to be beautiful. You need to access them, and access them now.

First, let me recommend that you update your global settings so you view details in a Windows Explorer pane by pressing on the Views button in the ribbon bar at the top and selecting Details...

...and while you have Windows Explorer open, press Alt, then T, then O and you should be at the Folder Options dialog where you select the View tab, then check Always show icons, never thumbnails and uncheck Hide extensions for known file types. You might as well also scroll down a bit and uncheck Remember each folder's view settings. Hit Apply.

That should override some of Microsoft's lame defaults for your user's desktop profile.

The God of Speed does not want you to double-click on My Computer when you want to open Windows Explorer. Instead, press Windows key + E and that'll open it right up. All you have to do now is to use the arrow keys to go up and down the list of drives. To expand a drive and see its directory structure, press the right arrow key, then continue scrolling using the up and down arrow keys. This should feel rather natural by this point.

Once you're at the right folder, tab over to the right pane and select your file. To rename it, hit F2. Look at its properties by pressing Alt + Enter. Or just open it by hitting Enter. Close Windows Explorer by hitting Alt + F4. File system access doesn't get any easier than that.