Polishing Windows

It seems there's no end to the improving and polishing that Windows requires. Consider the Windows XP Task Manager - it's awful. If you are anywhere beyond the noob level this is a tool you are going to want to replace with something like Process Explorer (which we recently discussed).

Needless to say it isn't the only thing in need of improvement, and over the years Microsoft has tried to do some polishing on its own. One of its better attempts was the virtual desktop manager.

This free tool expands a Windows desktop to cover four multiple virtual screens, and it is not bad except that it is slow and exhibits some odd behavior: If you run a task in one of the virtual screens and then move to another screen the task won't be displayed. If you try to use Alt+Tab to switch to the task its window will open for a second time in the new virtual screen. Yuck.

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It seems there's no end to the improving and polishing that Windows requires. Consider the Windows XP Task Manager - it's awful. If you are anywhere beyond the noob level this is a tool you are going to want to replace with something like Process Explorer (which we recently discussed).

Needless to say it isn't the only thing in need of improvement, and over the years Microsoft has tried to do some polishing on its own. One of its better attempts was the virtual desktop manager.

This free tool expands a Windows desktop to cover four multiple virtual screens, and it is not bad except that it is slow and exhibits some odd behavior: If you run a task in one of the virtual screens and then move to another screen the task won't be displayed. If you try to use Alt+Tab to switch to the task its window will open for a second time in the new virtual screen. Yuck.

We have found a better solution, an excellent virtual desktop manager called Virtual Dimension.

Virtual Dimension is fast, open source and free. It features an unlimited number of screens with an optional preview window that can be configured so that the screens are virtually arranged as a row, a column or a grid.

The preview window can be used to select a screen and can be docked on a screen edge and set to auto-hide. Virtual Dimension also optionally displays a System Tray icon, and you can create custom settings (wallpaper, desktop background color and "hotkey" access) for each screen.

Another excellent feature is Windows integration so you can right click in the title bar of an application and move its window from the current screen to another screen or to all screens simultaneously. You can also make the current window semi- or completely transparent or lock it to be the "topmost" window so it is always visible.

Virtual Dimension is the best virtual desktop manager we've found.

Another find of ours addresses something else Windows doesn't do well: handle sound. The problem is that Windows can't route sound data from a particular source to a particular destination. Enter Virtual Audio Cable, priced at a measly $30.

Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) is a driver for Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista that lets you transfer audio datastreams from one application to another by connecting a source and a destination using a "virtual cable." These cables are completely digital so there is no loss of sound quality.

You can define as many as 256 virtual cables by using the Virtual Audio Cable Control Panel. This large number of virtual cables can consist of as many as 32 Windows MME (Multimedia Extension) devices and/or any number of DirectSound devices.

Depending on the host processor, VAC can handle any fixed-rate PCM audio format from 200 to 1 million samples per second, 8 to 32 bits per sample, and one to eight channels (floating-point formats not supported) with an unlimited number of clients connected to each virtual cable.

With VAC you could, for example, take the data output by a VoIP application and use a virtual cable to input it to a recording tool as well as send it to the speaker output.