The Windows "Turn off" buttons are three or more steps away from the desktop work area, depending on your personal settings. This can be not only inconvenient, but downright bothersome at times. These programs can power down the computer, in just one or two steps.

Learn about a simple utility to launch files/folders by pressing a combination of keys, irrespective of which application is active.

Write a VB .NET application that constantly monitors a folder and raises events when there is any activity in that folder.

File type associations can be used in Windows to automatically start up a particular program every time someone double-clicks a file with a particular extension. This article shows how to do exactly that, using Visual Basic and the WIN32 API.