Sometime back, I came across this nifty little tool called
Launchy.
Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.
Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!
The results were really amazing. Since I started using it, I have never opened up Windows Explorer at all to locate my docs. A simple Windows+Spacebar shortcut fires Launchy and I just type the name of the doc I am looking for. Actually I manage to type a few characters in the app as it retrieves the document.

The best feature about Launchy is that you can set it to index and retrieve any filetype in your system. For instance, at my home PC, I have set Launchy up to index my mp3 folders. Now any song is just a few keypresses away.
The latest release adds a lot of support for stuff like plugins which take the application to a new level. A built-in calculator and a Firefox plugin has made this piece of software warrant a high place in my 'Must Have' tools list.
If you consider yourself a power-user or if you are tired of going through a complicated directory structure to locate your documents, you should head over
here and download Launchy and start using it immediately. Don’t worry, it doesn’t hog that much memory.