Adding multiple desktops to your PC

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If you could have a spare desktop, wouldn't life be a little easier?

technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Add multiple desktops to your PC

Oct. 31, 1999

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©1999, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©1999, The Syracuse Newspapers

   My PC has eight desktops.
   Don't laugh. At first I thought it was a crazy idea, too, but now I wouldn't even think of booting up without them.
   They're on my fancy Linux PC. But Windows users can have multiple desktops, too. I'll tell you how.
   But first I need to explain how this crazy idea turned into such a good thing.
   The notion of a "desktop" on your computer screen grew out of research Xerox did back in the 1970s. Xerox created a computer that had windows. You could drag them around the screen with a mouse. Somebody at Xerox could have just written it up this way: "You drag the windows around on the background," but that would have sounded weird. So the folks at Xerox talked about the "desktop" instead. You toss a note from the bank onto your real desktop; you drag a note in your word processor around on your computer desktop.
   Apple Computer borrowed the idea of the desktop when it created the Lisa computer in the early 1980s. Most people have never heard of the Lisa, but an improved version of the Lisa became world famous in 1984. It was called the Macintosh, and the best thing about the Mac was the desktop. You could put things there. You could put windows and icons on the desktop. Things you put there would stay there.
   Others knew a good thing when they clicked on it, and soon we had other operating systems with desktops -- GeoWorks for PCs, the Workbench for Amigas and GEM for STs. Microsoft had no real desktop in its operating systems until Windows 95, but the company made up for lost time.
   The desktop in Windows 95 turned out to be almost a model for how desktops should work. (I say "almost" because the Windows desktop has a few obvious faults. One is that desktop icons are "squishy," sometimes sliding out of position when you try to click on them. Another is that the desktop sometimes scrambles itself, hiding icons or even deleting them.)
   The desktop is a great invention for one reason: You have a place to work on things. You open a program and kazaam! the window for that program -- Microsoft Word, maybe -- is right there on the desktop. Open the calculator and you can put it right on the desktop, too, maybe off to the side. On the far left side or on the right you have a bunch of icons. You can drag files onto these icons to do drag-and-drop operations and, of course, you can launch programs by clicking their icons on the desktop.
   Is this neat or what? But one problem with a desktop is the way it gets messed up. (I don't just mean a computer desktop, either. You should see my desk at the office.) You end up with folders and programs all over the place, on top of each other, sandwiched between each other and more or less lost in the clutter.
   You can always click the "Minimize" button in Windows and clear windows and programs out of the way. All you have to do later is click on the Taskbar label to get the window to pop back up. (This is how Linux PCs running the KDE desktop work, too.)
   But this gets old fast. Making a Jack in the Box out of the windows on your screen is not the ideal way of clearing away some space.
   But if you could have a spare desktop, wouldn't life be a little easier? You could keep windows and programs open on one desktop and then switch quickly to another one where you could have something else you need to get at. Ideally, you'd want to have more than one spare desktop.
   That's the idea behind multiple desktops. KDE, the most popular Linux interface, lets you have eight, although it installs four desktops as the default. (You can add the others easily.) Each one has a label, which by default is just a number. You can change the labels to reflect what the desktops do. Mine are "Main," "Web," "Edit," "Mail" and so on. I do all my Web browsing on the Web desktop, and all my mail using a very large Netscape Mail window on the Mail desktop.
   I even have one desktop in Linux labeled "Win98" so I can run Windows 98 on its own desktop in Linux. (I do that using VMWare, which lets you run an entire virtual PC within Linux.)
   Linux handles multiple desktops easily. Windows 95 and 98 have single desktops ordinarily, but you can download utility programs that create multiple desktops, also called "virtual" desktops. Go to http://www.winfiles.com/apps/98/desktop-virtual.html for a list of utilities you can download. My choice, however, is not listed there. It's PowerPro, which I've raved about before. PowerPro is the single best multifunction utility for Windows. Read about it on my site at http://twcny.rr.com/technofile/texts/tec092098.html. There's a download link in the article.