Editor's words AltDesk

AltDesk is Virtual Desktop Manager for Windows, which makes your daily work easier, these are the exact words of the producer.
Most of my work is usually done under Windows operating system, but I couldn't have not noticed the benefit of a desktop manager used especially by window managers on Unix based system like Linux. So I began to try several desktop managers for Windows, always wanting something more, but never been fully satisfied.
Then I used AltDesk and things got better and better.

A brief list of AltDesk features includes:

• Easy task managing
• Simple, user-friendly interface
• Little resource consumption
• Hotkeys for any actions
• Skins to change the program's appearance
• Reliability: even in case of a failure you'll be able to recover the lost application's window
• Numerous advanced features, like setting unique wallpapers for each Virtual Desktop, sticky apps, autorun and so on

Working with AltDesk is quite easy. Program setting allows you to change the interface and display desktops within a table with custom number of rows or columns. Application running inside a virtual desktop are identified by their icons and thumbnails if you go to your mouse over.

Resource consumption is indeed very low so you can run it on slow machines also. I was quite amazed to see that AltDesk uses only 5 Mb of memory.

What I like the most on this virtual desktop manager and missed on the others is the true ALT + TAB functionality. When I use ALT + TAB combination I expect to browse between application running on the current desktop and this is exactly what happens with AltDesk. This small but mandatory feature made me uninstall all the other desktop managers I used before, because the virtual desktop effect vanishes when you see all applications running instead of the ones running on your current desktop.

The possibility to switch between multiple skins is not the thing I am looking for when working with an application, so I didn't investigate this feature too much. I used the skin installed by default: Trinity. Two things should be mentioned here though: base skin is horrible and the Glassy skin created unwanted space between desktops.

Another good thing is you can move running programs between desktops by just using dragging them to the desired desktop. This is a cool feature I liked.
Setting hotkeys for desktop navigation is the only thing that bothered me a little because I was expecting to be able to set CTRL + 1, CTRL + 2, ... combinations. AltDesk will only allow to set hotkeys for upper, lower, next and previous desktops, which might have or not meaning depending on the configuration. But again, this is a minor issue and I've just assigned CTRL + TAB for all actions as a quick and dirty workaround.

There are also plenty other features available like unique wallpaper for each desktop, autorun, ... and so on, but I will let you discover all these by yourselves.

Support and documentation
The program comes with a brief CHM manual which is pretty much all you need to get things started. More skins can be downloaded and even a skinning tutorial is available. If customers need more help with AltDesk, a FAQ section, forum and online support are also available on the producer site.

Final words
AltDesk is a great virtual desktop manager for Windows with lots of good features. I recommend this product to anyone who is tired of opening and closing applications just to make some room. AltDesk give you productivity and come with very low resource consumption, all these for a very good price. There is nothing that should stop anyone to give it a try.