Virtual Desktop Manager for Windows 7

Having spent last weekend tinkering on my Mac getting to grips with appcelerator’s Titanium – the awesome development platform for iPhone, Android, Windows, OS X & Linux, I really started getting into the cadence of working in various applications and grouping them into virtual desktops using OS X’s superb Spaces. When I swapped back to my Windows 7 / Visual Studio 2010 environment today I found I really missed having the extra virtual desktop real estate.

I remembered reading  that SysInternals had a desktop management tool called “Desktops” and decided to give it a whirl. It’s a very simple application to use – simply unzip and drop into your “Program Files” directory (remember to unblock the .exe first). Once you run the application it sits in the sys tray. Right click to get the configuration window. This allows you to set the key bindings. The virtual desktops preview in the bottom right hand side of your desktop.

There are two main problems with Desktops – the first is that only your main desktop can be aero enabled – all the rest run in Windows Classic mode. Although this isn’t a big issue, it is quite annoying. But the deal breaker is that Desktops doesn’t have have the nicest feature of Spaces which is sending an individual windows to different virtual desktops. Fortunately Dexpot doesn’t have this limitation. Dexpot runs all virtual desktops with Aero and allows you to send application windows to different desktops either by key combination or via context menu:

Dexpot also has plugins that allow 3d transformations, desktop wallpaper per virtual desktop and deeper Windows 7 taskbar integration:

Dexpot is also free and if you are looking for a good way to de-clutter your desktop and work more efficiently – it’s certainly a good start.

Work smarter, not harder.