Virgo Brings Virtual Desktops to Windows

From the looks of the pre-release builds of Microsoft’s new Windows 10 operating system, it appears that it is going to enjoy a virtual desktop system just like many of the Linux flavors like Ubuntu. But this leaves out the users who are still going to use Windows 7 or Windows 8 for some more time and are not planning to switch to Windows 10 right away. If you have decided not to switch to the new Windows 10 operating system in the near future, then you can still bring virtual desktops to your old Windows 7/8/8.1 PC using the free Virgo program.

Virgo is a very minimalist and portable program that brings your the benefits of having four virtual desktop at your avail without any bells and whistles. All you have to do is download the Virgo program archive, extract it to a folder and launch Virgo.exe from there. You will instantly have four virtual desktops enabled in your Windows PC. You can see a new icon in the notification area of Windows showing number 1 – meaning you are currently on virtual desktop #1.

Virgo Virtual Desktops

Since Virgo is minimalist software, it does not display any information or help regarding how to switch to virtual desktops etc. But a little digging through the source code of Virgo (Virgo is open source software), reveals that you can use Alt+N shortcut keys to switch to virtual desktop number N. You can also use Ctrl+N shortcut keys to move an active window to virtual desktop number N. As you can guess N can be anything from 1 to 4.

Virgo Virtual Desktops

While there are many similar software tools that bring virtual desktops to Windows, they put too much load on the system resources. Virgo on the other hand is a very small program (7 Kilobytes in size) and does not consume system memory at all (around 0.8 MB on my test PC).

Verdict: Virgo can bring virtual desktops to Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 (and even older versions of Windows). It is highly efficient and has very little impact on the system resources.

You can download Virgo from https://github.com/papplampe/virgo/releases.