When one desktop is not enough, there's WindowsPager

It doesn’t take long to fill your PC’s desktop. Open a browser here, a word processor there, keep a copy of Explorer running in the background, Notepad maybe, and soon it’s starting to take a real effort to locate and switch to the application you need next.

WindowsPager could make your life a little easier, though, with its lightweight support for virtual desktops. Launch the program and you’ll see four new buttons on the taskbar, one for each desktop, and simply clicking the one you need will switch to it right away.

At its simplest, you could just use the program to gain a little more working space. So if you’ve filled up one desktop, say, just choose another and you’ll have a shiny, new and entirely empty desktop to explore. So you might have Excel maximized in one desktop, a browser in another, Explorer running in a third, a few smaller apps open in the other, whatever you like -- and you can switch from one group of windows to another with a click.

Sometimes you may need to reorganize your desktops a little, and WindowsPager makes that easy, too. The taskbar buttons show representations of the windows they contain, for instance; if you drag and drop these from one desktop to another then their parent windows move, as well. And right-clicking a window title bar also reveals a new menu, which allows you to move a window from one desktop to another.

The program also provides the option to set some windows as "always on top", or ensure others are "always visible" (they’re displayed on all of your desktops).

And if you prefer to use keyboard shortcuts, then they’re also available, so you can move windows around or switch between desktops without ever having to touch the mouse.

If you’re nervous about this kind of tool, then you’re not alone; we’re always slightly concerned that low-level tweakery may have undesirable effects if the author doesn’t know precisely what he or she is doing. The good news here, though, is that WindowsPager is portable, no installation is required, so if you have problems for whatever reason then the worst that can happen is you’ll have to reboot, at which point your system will return to normal.

And the program is also surprisingly lightweight. Even though there’s a relatively involved user interface on the taskbar, the various WindowsPager processes still only used around 4MB on our test PC, so you can leave the program running just about anywhere without worrying about having it drain your system resources.