prupert

Windows Session Save and Restore

So, I do a lot of work from home and often have a large number of different programs and files open at the same time. I use two different computers, with the mouse and keyboard shared between the two using the excellent Synergy+. Often I am working on a particular project that last a number of days, each day I need to open the same files and folders. I was wondering if there was an app out there that allowed me to save my Windows “session” i.e. all the programs and files that I had open so I could quickly restore them the next day.

Now, after doing a lot of searching, sadly it seems there isn’t The best solution seems to be to use Windows Standby/Hibernate. But this is kinda impracitcal, since I want to use the computer after I have saved the session. Another option seemed to be TwinsPlay which has a Session Save feature, but this seemed to crash my computer and kill Windows Explorer so that was out. Another option was SmartClose however, this only managed to save the running programs, but not the actual files those programs had open (so it would save and restore OpenOffice, but not the XLS file that OpenOffice actually had open). So once again, this was no real use. My final option was Microsoft Research’s own GroupBar. Sadly though, this also only saved and restored the running program, not the file that that had open.

So, I am kinda stuck My only alternative is to create a batch file to do this, so I would create a new text file, put in the following commands, as an example:

start /d C:\Windows\System32\ calc.exe
start /d "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox" firefox.exe https://www.bankofamerica.com
start /d C:\finance\spreadsheets budget.xls

And then save it as start.bat (thanks to watchingthenet). But this is hardly the best solution. I am sure there is a better solution out there and if anyone knows it, hit me up in the comments (I recon Autohotkey can do this, but I don’t know where to start).

Tags: Hacks, Shortcuts