Quadruple Your Desktop Thanks to SysInternals
Saturday August 23, 2008
Slightly off topic but I like to keep you aware of useful tools that can simplify your life as a developer. Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell of Systinternals.com (now part of Microsoft) have released a free tool that is a whopping 62KB in size. I suspect they saw the same thing on Linux and thought- "I can do that". Just download the file, run it and it gives you up to 4 desktops that you can switch between with 48 different keystroke combinations. Or click on the system tray to see the desktop selector (pictured).
I say up to 4 because it depends on how large your screen(s) are and what color resolution. I have two screens running at 1280x1024 each and with 32 bit color I could only get two before it ran out of memory. Reducing my color resolution to 16 bits gave me an extra screen. I notice that each desktop runs its own copy of explorer.exe. There's no way to kill it- except by zapping Desktops.exe in task manager. It also doubles as a perfect "Hide it from the Boss" application! I've added a link in the Windows tools and Utilities.
When switching to other desktop window using hot key, it remains there for few seconds and comes back to the main (original) window. How to solve this ?
thanks.. had tried various such utilities before with mixed results.
I especially had a problem with most, that they didn’t keep the order of my windows in the taskbar, as I had specified it with “Taskbar Shuffle” (another useful util).
Sysinternals Desktops, does keep my windows as arranged, when switching back to a desktop.
I also have the same problem. After switching to other desktop it always comes back to first one, and I have tried it in several computers / OS. It doesn’t work!!!
@ Dharmendra and Little:
I had this problem too. I tracked it down to a conflict with Acronis Scheduler2 Service (Acronis Scheduler Helper: schedhlp.exe). I disabled it with Sysinternals Autoruns.