Launchy

Here's something you can use if you don't like having icons all over your desktop for your most used items. It's called Launchy and it's quite a handy tool.

It indexes all your files and folders so that it can easily access them and launch them with a few keystrokes. I use it for pretty much everything I need to open except for folders because... well... i'm not exactly 100% sure but i believe you have to type in the full address path to open it. Eg. C:\Users\Kari
if you open a particular file more often than others, it will show your search faster and possibly with less keystrokes required
Eg. When you use Launchy and you want to use Firefox, you type in "firefox" at first. Then, you can type in less keystrokes "firef" and eventually, you may end up by just typing in "f"

Sometimes, you may not find what you wanted to launch when you type in something like say... "mine" when you want to play minecraft (lol....) but it comes up with minesweeper (XD)
when this happens, you just wait a few moments and a drop down list will appear, if minecraft is there, you select it and launch it. those keystrokes will be saved for a faster access the next time you want to launch that program.

Sometimes~ there may even be times when you type in the full name of the program that you want and it doesn't show up.