Many XP users may be familiar with the Virtual Desktop Manager XP Powertoy which allowed you to create up-to 4 virtual desktops, unfortunately it was not the best of softwares and did not work with Windows Vista.

Microsoft released a free alternative for managing virtual desktop’s called SysInternals (a company they acquired) Desktops. Desktops is basically a lightweight (62 Kb) software that runs out of the box without requiring any install. Like the XP powertoy, Desktops too allows you to create 4 virtual desktops which you can access using hotkeys.

You can create multiple desktops by clicking on the Desktops icon in the system tray. Creating multiple virtual desktops could be quite useful, since you can easily assign all personal windows to one virtual desktop, work related app run on another virtual desktop and so on.

The only problem we saw with the software is the ability to easily exit the virtual desktops, which can be quite annoying since you have to force-kill the application using either task manager or process explorer. Though this is a major short coming we do expect it to be fixed in future versions.

Download Microsoft SysInternals Desktops | Live SysInternals Desktops