I really can’t see Microsoft adding it into Windows itself, not even for Windows 7, so I’ll have to keep looking around for decent freeware alternatives.

The annoying thing is that as of yet, I haven’t really found any decent desktop managers which are simple, stable and perform well.

Today however, I found one which I really liked the look of on CodePlex.

Multiple Desktops for XP and Vista is a alpha quality desktop manager which you can try out here, but is pretty unusable right now. What I liked about it is the simplicity, ease-of-use and generally good design. Using the new Windows Vista live thumbnails it can give “give you a full screen preview of all of your desktops.”

At the moment however it’s slow and buggy, but I shall be keeping an eye on it for upcoming versions.

The full set of features includes:

• An infinite number of desktops only limited by the amount of memory in your computer
• A full screen desktop/window manager/switcher
• Live Vista thumbnails of all of your windows
• An alpha-blended indicator window to provide a visual indicator when you switch between desktops
• Hotkeys for up to 9 desktops using your numpad keys along with "send window to desktop" hotkeys
• A system tray icon to access a menu containing items for every desktop, no matter how many
• Multiple-monitor support
• Arrow key hotkeys
• One system tray icon per desktop (optional)
• Window-specific menus
• Sticky windows to exclude windows from the virtual desktop manager
• Per-desktop backgrounds
• XP support
• Thumbnail window tool
• Show all windows hotkey
• Show mini-preview at cursor hotkey
• Program rules for locking programs onto desktops
• Command line arguments for launching programs onto desktops, switching desktops, and showing the switcher

You can check it out here.

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