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MS Virtual Desktop Manager

Published to Blog on 14 Dec 2006

After reading Scott’s post about Virtual Desktop Manager, one of Microsoft’s XP PowerToys, I decided to give it a try. Like everyone else I have about a gazillion applications open at once and this little tools sounded like a good way to keep everything better organized.

First off I’ll say that it plays well with UltraMon, which is a great.

After using it for the last 30 minutes I think it is very nice productivity and organization enhancing tool. I may come to depend on this one. 

Like Scott, I too have a couple of suggestions to make it even better.

  • It would be great if I could label buttons - so rather than 1, 2, 3, 4 I could have “Outlook”, “Firefox”, “VS.NET”, and “SQLServer”. If nothing else maybe a little smart tag that would show when I moused over one of the existing 1,2,3,4 buttons.

  •  It would be awesome if they could implement a “Smart Taskbar” similar to UltraMon so that only the applications that are “live” in that window would show up in the taskbar for that window.  It already has this - see Joe’s comment below.


Dan Hounshell
Web geek, nerd, amateur maker. Likes: apis, node, motorcycles, sports, chickens, watches, food, Nashville, Savannah, Cincinnati and family.
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  • On 14 Dec 2006 "Joe"" said:
    For item 2, right click on the MSVD toolbar and turn off "Shared Desktops". This will make it so only the right things showup in the taskbar. Not sure why this isn't the default, who doesn't want it to work like that?
  • On 14 Dec 2006 """ said:
    Hmmm, thanks for the tip. Maybe I should RTFM.