Desktop Enhancement

Dexpot is a deceptively simple virtual desktop program with many powerful features "hidden" beneath its surface for power uses. At its most basic, it creates up to twenty virtual desktops and allows you to move open programs between them and switch between desktops. This lets you, say have work projects open on one desktop, email on another, and your web browser and instant messenger programs on a third and switch between them based on what you are doing at the moment (or whether your boss is in the room).

Jumplists are one of the most useful new features in the Windows 7 taskbar. Programs with well designed jumplists allow you to do all sorts of useful things by right-clicking on the taskbar button. Unfortunately, older programs do not know about jumplists and even many new programs do not take full advantage of jumplists. Jumplist Extender is a free program that allows you to add new items to a program's jumplist -- even older program that are not aware of jumplists.

As I find the Windows Start Menu too crowded for easy use, I've been using True Launch Bar and Powerpro on Windows XP to modify the taskbar to start programs the way I like. Unfortunately, the Windows 7 task bar works much differently than in any other version of windows and my old reliables just don't work very well on my new Windows 7 box. After looking around, I found a freeware program that both looks nice and does the basic job I need done, even if it does not have all the bells and whistles I'm used to: 7stacks.

If you are anything like me, you often need to launch multiple programs to do your work. For example, when I'm working on a web page I need my HTML editor, my browser, my photo editor, my text editor to use as a scratch pad, and I need to start my local web server and database server. It's a bit annoying to have to find each of these programs in my start menu (I don't do the hundreds of icons on my desktop bit) and start it.

Enter the freeware Lacuna Launcher.

It's hard to beat Windows Live Skydrive from Microsoft with its 25 gigs of free remote storage. This beats any other free storage service I know of. However, it can be a bit of a pain to use as you have to go to the Windows Live Skydrive site in your browser to upload or download files.

ActivateByNum adds task-switching hotkeys on XP and Vista -- like on Windows 7. You just press the Win key plus a number to switch to the nth program showing on your taskbar. For example, if your taskbar shows NotePad, Word, Firefox, and Excel in that order, pressing Win+1 would switch to Notepad, pressing Win+2 which switch to Word, etc. If you like to keep your hands on the keyboard, this little utility is very nice.

Operating System: Windows XP, Windows Vista
Version: 20090613

Find and Run Robot (FARR) is a program for Windows users who are keyboard maniacs -- it uses an adaptive "live search" function to rapidly find programs and documents on your computer as you type.

Press your chosen hotkey to display the FARR window, then just start typing the first letters of the application you want to launch and the results appear instantly. Hit enter to launch the top result, or refine your search with special modifiers and commands.

Sometimes you just want to open or execute a file in a directory you use a lot. Opening a file manager, browsing to and opening the file and then closing the file manager is a lot of work if you have to do it often enough. The Menu File Browser Applet is an applet for the GNOME Panel. It lets put one or more directories of your choice on the GNOME Panel as menus. You can browse and open files in these directories (and their subdirectories) directly from the panel, without having to open a file manager.

KDE 4.0 has been released, with a large number of improvements to the KDE desktop. I tried it. Unfortunately, I don't think it is really ready for everyday use yet as there are lots of (mainly minor, at least from my brief trial) problems and issues. I'm going to stay with Gnome for the time being, but I will probably need to re-evaluate this decision in six to nine months as KDE 4 is very nice -- or looks like it will be very nice once more of its problems are worked out.

WinMover enhances the Microsoft Windows desktop environment by giving you more ways to move and position windows on your desktop. For example, if you hold down the Alt-key with WinMover running, you can move or resize a window by pressing the mouse button anywhere in the windows and dragging. This is very handy when a program displays its windows mostly off-screen where you can't get to the the title bar and/or the edges to click and drag.

However, WinMover can do more as its "main features" list shows:

- Works with MDI-windows