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Does the name “MultiDesk” pique your interest? It does mine. This is a super sweet program that allows you to make the most out of your power user experience by utilizing multiple desktops simultaneously (if you’ve used a Linux GUI like KDE or Gnome before you’ll know exactly what I am talking about). This can probably be best explained by a screen shot:

In this example I have setup four separate desktops, each with it’s own icon and appearance settings. That’s right, you can even change the background colour and image for each desktop you create so you can give yourself convenient visual clues as to which desktop you are currently working in. A program open in one desktop cannot be seen from any of the other desktops which keeps the taskbar free of clutter.

This is the context menu that pops up when you right click the MultiDesk taskbar icon. The desktops I have created are listed along with their icons. The menu also provides quick access to all of the programs that are currently running which is handy if you need to quickly swap to a program not on the current desktop.

One negative point that I noticed was that if MultiDesk crashes you will only have available the programs on the currently enabled desktop (specifically, the programs on the other desktops will be impossible to access, but they will still be running and using up resources). Now, it is virtually impossible to say what caused the program to crash (whether it was the software’s fault or the fault of a quirky conflict between two or more programs), but this is something to keep in mind. Running many concurrent programs under Win98 or even WinME is probably not recommended as they don’t deal well with intense multitasking. I would highly recommend using Windows 2000 Pro if you are going to get hardcore into the power-user groove, but that is neither here nor there for now :] .

Test System

Operating systems:
Windows 98SE (v4.10.2222 A)
Windows 2000 (v5.00.2195 w/ SP1)

Hardware:

Benchmarks

The benchmarks I used were 3Dmark2000, QuakeIII (demo001), the MDK2 demo, and Video 2000. Each test was run 5 times with the highest and lowest scores removed leaving 3 scores which were averaged for the final total. Each benchmark was run with the highest possible quality settings, other than the variables being tested. Tests using 16bit colour depth used 16bit textures and tests using a 32bit colour depth used 32bit textures. FSAA and vertical sync were disabled for all of the tests.

3Dmark2000 – Global Settings:
	Z-buffer Depth: 16bit (@16bit colour depth) and 24bit (@32bit colour depth)
	Texture Format: 16bit (@16bit colour depth) and 32bit (@32bit colour depth)
	Frame Buffer: Triple
	Intel Pentium Optimizations for the G550
	Hardware T&L for everything else

QuakeIII (demo001) – Global Settings:
	Lighting: Lightmap
	Geometric Detail: High
	Texture Detail: Highest
	Texture Filters: Trilinear
	Full Screen: On

MDK2 Demo – Global Settings:
	Colour Depth: 32bit
	Texture Quality: Highest
Filtering: Trilinear
	Mipmap on
	Full screen on
	Hardware T&L on (not utilized by the G550)