Mark Russinovich and his Sysinternals applications have an excellent reputation among IT professionals. The newest application Microsoft Desktops will surely add to that. It was developed by Mark and Bryce Cogswell and provides the user with up to four virtual desktops to organize the applications.
The interesting aspect about Microsoft Desktops is that it is a lightweight application. It uses less than four Megabytes of computer memory to run which is a very good value for applications of this kind. The user is asked to define the hotkeys that switch between the virtual desktops during program start.
The default option is ALT and the numbers 1-4. Other keys that are available are CTRL, SHIFT and Windows and the F-keys. Switching between the virtual desktops works extremely well and fluent, there is virtually no delay.
All icons and shortcuts that have been placed on the standard desktop are replicated and available in every virtual desktop as well.
The program places an icon in the Windows system tray that displays the contents of the virtual desktops when left-clicked. Another click would select the virtual desktop and bring it up on the computer monitor.
The options of Microsoft Desktops are also accessible through the system tray icon.
Related posts:
Virtual Desktops and Windows XpMultiple Desktops for XP and Vista
Minimize Windows To A Single System Tray Icon
Disable Computer Keyboard Keys
Hide all icons on your desktop
Microsoft Time Zone
Configure Window and Mouse behavior with Pitaschio
Restore Desktop Icons
7 Responses to “Microsoft Desktops”
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[...] Windows only: Desktops, a new Vista-compatible 1.0 release from Microsoft’s Sysinternals team, is a multi-desktop tool for Windows users who don’t want, or can’t afford the system resources for, a complete virtual desktop solution, such as VirtuaWin or other tools we’ve covered. Desktops simply asks you to assign universal shortcut keys for desktop switching between a maximum of four (Shift+Ctrl+F1, for example), and then nests in your system tray to offer thumbnail views and switching by clicking. One plus is that Desktops doesn’t load new memory-hogging desktops until you create them. The big downsides are an inability to drag apps between desktops, along with incompatibility with some tools (Firefox, Launchy, and anything that doesn’t like multiple instances, for that matter). So it’s mostly a simple means of keeping full-screen email, browsers, office apps, and other programs separated, but it does that pretty well—with improvements, hopefully, to come. Desktops is a free download for Windows systems only. Desktops [Windows Sysinternals via gHacks] [...]
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[...] Via | gHacks [...]
Doesnt work at all :-(
For instance I create Desktop2 and it keeps reverting to Desktop1, then Desktop2 is not “blank” … not ready yet it would seem …
no option to quit the program either …
Well it works nicely on my end. You can end the applications in the Task Manager. Yes, that’s a bit unfortunate ;)
“All icons and shortcuts that have been placed on the standard desktop are replicated and available in every virtual desktop as well.”
Which is exactly what I DO NOT want.
What I DO want is completely separate desktops where everything (icons, icons sizes, icon layouts, themes, etc.) is isolated and separated from the other desktops.
Let me know if you find a TRUE virtual desktop program.
I would not like that… I like simple desktops and as I have to use Windows XP at school I was glad to discover that close relative of my other favorite window manager (fluxbox, Ion2 is my other fav.) has a windows port that can replace explorer.exe as desktop fully. I mean BlackBox port called bb4win.
By default it provides 4 desktops but you can add or decrease the count of them to any that you might want. Originally it does not provide any kind of icons on desktop, but on windows version they have added support for various plugins to place on desktop – one of them providing customizable icons. I’m not sure if the plugins can be set up differently on different desktops but unfortunately I think that they are static… However the major point of having multiple desktops is running different application(s) on different desks. bb4win is also much lighter in both, memory and cpu usage.
“All icons and shortcuts that have been placed on the standard desktop are replicated and available in every virtual desktop as well.”
Which is exactly what I DO NOT want.
What I DO want is completely separate desktops where everything (icons, icons sizes, icon layouts, themes, etc.) is isolated and separated from the other desktops.
Let me know if you find a TRUE virtual desktop program.