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Door staff@engadget.com (Deven McClure) - 25 Oct 2026
For best results, dedicate each desktop to a particular purpose so you don't get mixed up. You might keep music, chat and social apps on one desktop, distancing those potential distractions from work in Excel or your email client. Using features of apps like browser profiles can further help with logical separation. If you have a single monitor, virtual desktops are a decent way to effectively get more screen real estate.
You can get even more out of your multi-desktop setup by adjusting some settings in Windows. To better optimize your taskbar and Alt + Tab functionality across multiple desktops, do the following:
Open the Settings app with Windows + I.
Select System, then Multitasking.
Expand the Desktops section.
There, you can choose either Only on the desktop I'm using or On all desktops for both available options: On the taskbar, show all the open windows and Show all open windows when I press Alt+Tab. For more segmentation, limit app switching to the desktop you're currently using.
This multi-desktop functionality can be improved with a small free program called Windows Virtual Desktop Helper, available on GitHub. It's particularly useful if you utilize many different desktops and often have trouble navigating or differentiating them, since it gives the option to show a desktop's name more prominently when you switch to it, as well as displaying which desktop you're on in the system tray. You can also use it to navigate through desktops from the system tray, or set custom navigation hotkeys to quickly shift to different desktops.
You can get even more out of your multi-desktop setup by adjusting some settings in Windows. To better optimize your taskbar and Alt + Tab functionality across multiple desktops, do the following:
Open the Settings app with Windows + I.
Select System, then Multitasking.
Expand the Desktops section.
There, you can choose either Only on the desktop I'm using or On all desktops for both available options: On the taskbar, show all the open windows and Show all open windows when I press Alt+Tab. For more segmentation, limit app switching to the desktop you're currently using.
This multi-desktop functionality can be improved with a small free program called Windows Virtual Desktop Helper, available on GitHub. It's particularly useful if you utilize many different desktops and often have trouble navigating or differentiating them, since it gives the option to show a desktop's name more prominently when you switch to it, as well as displaying which desktop you're on in the system tray. You can also use it to navigate through desktops from the system tray, or set custom navigation hotkeys to quickly shift to different desktops.