The “Break it Down” Blog

Have you ever found yourself juggling so many extra windows at work (or at home) on your desktop that you wished you have access to multiple desktops so you could group them together and not clutter one desktop with everything? Yea, me too…

Linux has had the idea of “multiple desktops” or “virtual desktops” for a long time now, and within the last year or 2 has implemented the idea with nice 3D-switching/representation thanks to Compiz. Mac just got this functionality in Leopard called “Spaces” which is the same idea (hell, even the iPhone has a similar concept); unsurprisingly Windows has never provided this functionality.

If you are on Windows XP or Vista (I’m on Vista) there is a project out there that does provide this functionality, it’s called Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager, and it’s free.

This program behaves exactly as you would expect it to:

• Install
• Run program in system tray
• Use “switch desktop” keys to move between desktops (Windows-ARROWS)
• Work with multiple desktops

For the most part using the software is really straight forward. There are quite a few configuration settings for not only how many desktops you want, which physical monitors you want the application to utilize, how you want to switch between them, keystrokes, how you want them to appear as well as applications to be excluded from the switching process.

You will get a current desktop indicator down in the lower right of your monitor showing you the “desktop” you currently have focused, and mousing over the system tray icon will also show you an overview composite of all your desktops and all the applications running on them overlapped:

On paper all of this looks pretty awesome, unfortunately the software is still a bit buggy. You will run into rendering snaffu’s quite a bit with either hanging artifacts from other windows pulling onto other desktops, like with GoToMeeting’s Skype integration button:

I also noticed you’ll see Internet Explorer wipe out it’s buffer every time you switch, so when you come back the entire IE screen is white until you get it to repaint itself.

Also the Virtual Desktop Manager can get very memory hungry at times. For the most part, on a 1920×1200 resolution desktop with 4 virtual desktops, I run at about 130-150mb of ram used:

but there have been 2 other occasions that I’ve popped open the Task Manager to look at the process and saw it uses roughly 250mb of ram. So unless you have 2GB of ram and aren’t already maxing out your ram usage, I wouldn’t recommend using this app (at least on Vista).

I’ve been using Virtual Desktop Manager quite a bit for the last few days and I would say it mostly does what I wanted it to do, but has it’s share of glitches.

I have a few friends that used it as well and they commented that the less desktops you use (2-4) the better it behaves. One person in particular mentioned using 9 virtual desktops and how VDM became really buggy and unwieldy until he dialed it back down to 2 virtual desktops. That might be a handy tip to remember incase you run into some issues with it yourself.

Overall I’d say about a 7 out of 10 and the app has about another year worth of tuning and refinement before I’d say it would be a good util to install by default with a fresh Windows install.

Update #1: After about a month of use I stopped using this program. I started using it at version 0.6 or so and used it through the 0.9 update and it was not buggy enough to not drive me crazy daily.

The most common issue that made me nuts is what I guess was caching. If you had say 4 desktops, all with apps, then would not switch to any of them for a while, maybe 3 or 4 hours, then try and switch, the process could take up to 60 secs before *anything* would happen, like it was paging 10GB of data off the disk back into ram or something. The problem was that if you tried to “exercise” the virtual desktops it didn’t seem to help; once it had gone into that rediculous slow-down state, you had to restart the software to get it to be usable again.

Also the rendering glitches like shown above were a constant annoyance that never went away.

I think this software is the only thing that will give you virtual desktops on Windows so you will probably want to keep your eyes on it, but for now I didn’t find it that usable over long periods of time.