"What is RK Launcher?
RK Launcher is a free application that will allow the user to have a visually pleasing bar at the side of the screen that is used to quickly launch shortcuts. (Mine is on the top side of the screen as you can see below). With support for themes, PNG's and ICO's and with smooth amazing animations, RK Launcher is a versatile and great taskbar replacement - and amen to this!"

RK Launcher is free for download from various sources in the web. Previously, I used YZ Dock but when I found out about this software, I never used the other again. It is relatively easy to use, efficient, and gives users a lot of control. Say, you want to add Mozilla Firefox short-cut to RK Launcher. You can do this by left-clicking and holding the Mozilla icon either from start menu or on your desktop and dropping it to RK Launcher bar - it's that easy. And you can also categories your shortcuts in RK Launcher by adding a separator. Settings for RK Launcher is only a right click away - right click RK Launcher bar and you'll find all the settings there. You can set the bar to hide automatically and be transparent. You ca do more things that you could ever imagine, it's like having the nice Mac icon below it's monitor placed on Windows OS.

How to install? Just download the file, unzip, using WinZip or WinRar or any software that can open the file and copy it somewhere in your pc, c:\Progrom Files\RK Launcher is a good place to place the files. If you want RK Launcher to start when Windows starts-up, right click RKLauncher.exe and select copy and go to Run and type this C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup. A folder should open and then you can right click on the empty space of that folder and select Paste shortcut. What we did was to actually add a shortcut to RK Launcher in the Startup programs, this way, RK Launcher will open every time Windows starts.

On a personal note though, RK Launcher might use a lot of your processing power so make sure to tweak it properly. Having the Quality Normal and Magnification transition not set to smooth in the Performance tab is generally a good idea. And also, uncheck in the Behavior tab the option to Minimize to RK Launcher, this way, you won't be blaming me why are your windows missing when you minimize them.

Hope you enjoyed the review. You'll find more on this blog. I'd be posting more of the software that I like and most of which are for free.