workspace managers for win a small review thanks to all those people who recommended workspace managers for windows i found shareware workspace managers from australia s ms windows archive monu cc monash edu au which mirrors some sites in the u s the three i found were workspaces wspace zip this was the smallest and simplest of the workspace managers that i found it is very easy to use it displays a small window containing buttons plus an extra button for configuration purposes one annoying feature was the title window that is first presented when it is run you must press a key not a mouse button for the thing to go away also it would have been nice if there was an always on top setting for the little window containing the workspace buttons maybe some user specified strings on the buttons instead of the numbers one to six might be a nice feature the simplicity and ease of use of this workspace manager makes it an attractive package workshift wrksft zip while this workspace manager offered a few features that workspaces lacked it was quite time consuming to set things up with workspaces all but the first workspace is initially empty with workshift you need to take snapshots of how you want each of your workspaces to look like i e what applications they contain also the main window is quite large but this does allow you to have a small view of what is in each workspace with workspaces there was no facility for viewing what was in a workspace without switching to it workshift provides this viewing functionality which is quite useful bigdesk and backmenu backdesk zip this is an interesting package which contains a few other goodies as well as a workspace manager other goodies include backmenu which provides a pop up root menu when you press a certain mouse button just like in x windows the menu is totally configurable offering unlimited depth of cascading menus which is provides quite handy access to applications you could say it is a menu based alternative to the program manager also bundled in backdesk zip is a program called wrun which allows you to run windows applications from a dos shell under windows instead of using the file manager to run applications the actual workspace manager is called bigdesk bigdesk works quite differently to the other two workspace managers in that it doesn t provide a certain number of disjoint and separate workspaces in fact it basically enlarges your desktop by a configurable amount and you choose which region of the desktop you want your screen to focus in on this means you can have windows overlapping between different viewing regions unlike the first two workspace managers in which each workspace was isolated from the other one the bigdesk control window allows to to move windows around your enlarged desktop basically the control window provides a small scale view of your viewing area while your actual computer screen provides a large scale or blow up of a particular section try each of them out for yourself i was impressed with all of them so find out which one suits your needs the best
