PortaMenu is a free menu launcher which lets organize your favorite programs in a custom menu, and quickly launch them. It lets you launch applications present on your system or any external media from a single menu. It lets you create a list of programs and show them in a single menu. You can add the executable file of each program to its menu and launch it from there. So, you can use it to maintain a list of your favorite programs, and launch them quickly.
You can add programs to PortaMenu’s list either from your system’s hard drive or from any external device like USB, CD etc. You can launch any program from this list just by making a double mouse click. You don’t need to memorize the exact path via directories and folders to run a specific program; Once you add it to PortaMenu, it will remember it for you.
PortaMenu is quite simple and basic in its operation. Personally, I would go with tons of other application launchers available out there. But if you are indeed looking for something very basic, keep reading.
PortaMenu makes a list of different applications and allows you to open any of them from a single menu. You just need to launch PortaMenu and it will give you a menu containing programs which you have added earlier. From this list you can launch as many programs as you want.
How PortaMenu works to launch applications from a single menu:
In order to use PortaMenu to launch all your programs, you need to add them to its menu. You can click on the “Add Item” button and add as many programs as you want. As you add a specific program to PortaMenu from a local disk or external media, it remembers the relative path of the application. After that you can just launch PortaMenu to run the program; no need to go to through the hierarchy of files and folders to run it. It’s an easy way to launch your favorite applications from a single place.
Also check out another interesting software that lets you automatically launch a program at a scheduled time.
Features of PortaMenu:
- Reordering of programs: You can reorder the programs in PortaMenu if you want. Like I did with my list of programs, I kept those programs at the top which I use frequently and left the remaining at the bottom. This arrangement made my launch task even more easy.
- Making Groups: You can keep similar programs together by creating Groups. For Instance, all the Image Editing Software like Toolwiz Pretty Photo, Paint.NET, Photopad etc, can be kept in a single group called “Image Editors”. To find the “Group” option, you need to click on the Edit Item button.
- Security: PortaMenu has an inbuilt hash function which checks all the programs in its menu for safety before launching. It controls any suspicious program from harming the system.
PortaMenu is a nice and handy program to launch applications from a single menu. The only flaw which I came across is that the program sometimes stop responding while adding applications to its menu. Otherwise, it serve as a good application launcher to quickly launch all your programs.
