What:

This is quite a handy trick, especially if you meet the minor requirements. Ill list them below from my personal opinion, and explain why I think that way. Now to tell you about this… this little tool lets you run multiple virtual desktops on your Windows XP computer. Much like Linux if you have ever been on it. I can not say its like Compiz but its probably the closest you can get with a product of software from Microsoft. Unfortunately, the virtual desktops do not update on a “live” basis. But I advise you take a breif if not thorough look at this interesting article!

What you need:

• A reasonably fast computer (1.5 GHz minimum)
• Lots of memory. We are generating strong images here.
• Graphics card. I would say it would work best at minimum with 64 MB graphics card.

How:

1. This is a program made by Microsoft, so you can guess there will be at least minor inefficiency’s. However, from my experience it isn’t too much of a noose. So download link is here.
2. Install away!!! Dont worry, its not too painful of an installer.
3. Once installed, right click your task bar. Go to Toolbars > Desktop Manager.
4. You will see some oddly shaped green circle with a few rectangles in it. Along with that you will see “Quick switch Buttons” (1, 2, 3, 4) and maybe even some text beside it.
5. Congrats! You have multiple virtual desktops. This is not all. Feel free to mess around with the settings, just be cautious because some hot keys are already pre-binded. Windows Key + 1 will link to desktop 1 and so on.

Extra Tweaks:

• I personally like to just use the green button. This shows all of your desktops in a GUI making it easier to manipulate which one you want to view. To hide the 4 other blue buttons for each desktop, right click the green button and un-check “Show Quick Switch Buttons”.
• If you like to use this to keep your desktop organized, and each window on its own desktop, right click the green button and un-check “Shared Desktops”.
• The window animations for showing the desktops are quite laggy in my opinion. It seems as if Microsoft used some kind of VB command +1 on a window till it got to a certain width and height that it would stop. This is baaaad graphics animation. To disable this right click the famous green button and un-check “Use Animations”.
• Once and for all, to disable the Virtual Desktops. Right click your taskbar, go to Toolbars > Desktop Manager (so it is unchecked). Immediately all the windows on all of your desktops will be placed on your main desktop. So long MSVDM!

Screenshot:

Note: It was quite weird on my first run. The text to the left of the green button that said MSVDM was gone. I do not know how I got rid of it, but soon after I disabled MSVDM then re-enabled it, the text is now appearing… and not leaving. Well.. its a product of Microsoft, so worst comes to worst use an API spy and hide it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 6th, 2007 at 10:49 am and is filed under Cool Tutorials, Technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.