Like most Windows devs I really like the Sysinternals family of products.  So when I caught wind this morning of a new product called Desktops that creates a virtual workspace of up to 4 desktops I just knew it was the product I was looking for.  Well, it sort of is.

You can’t ask for an easier installation.  Unzip it and drop it on a folder and run it.  In the dialog that appears you can select whether to run it at startup.  Here’s a shot of that dialog.

image 

It has a nice selection of options to select which desktop you are using but sadly it doesn’t support the most important one — the arrow keys!  Someone who is using virtual desktop software is enough of a power user that they will want to switch desktops on-the-fly without looking at the keyboard.  Sure I can whack a number key without looking but the T-shape arrow keypad just fits with the metaphor a bit better.  A simple Ctrl+Shift+Arrow would do the trick.

The other problem is the speed. It’s a bit slow and has no nice swipes or transitions but it is free software so I’m really not griping about that too much.

All in all a welcome bit of software.  Thanks Mark!