If you are within 30 feet of me at the office you know I'm grumpy when it comes to workspace. I'm not super excited about moving away from my monitor to only work on my laptop screen. The 1200x800 resolution feel really cramped with working inside of Visual Studio, Flash Professional, and several other IDEs that take up a lot of space on your screen. There isn't much I can do about hardware so, I started looking for a software solution.
I'd have to say the one thing that the one big thing I wish Windows had was built in multiple desktops. The Mac OS has "Spaces" and several Linux OSes have built in Virtual Desktops. I really enjoy using the virtual desktops in Ubuntu. Windows doesn't have anything that I'm aware of that is built in like this, but there are several pieces of software that allow you to have multiple virtual desktops. I started using VirtuaWin about a month ago and I've been very happy with how the software operates.
VirtuaWin is the third virtual desktop application that I've tried out. I had mixed results with the others I tried. One had great graphical transitions between desktops, but significantly slowed down my machine. The other wasn't as customizable as I wanted. VirtuaWin is lightweight, very customizable, AND it has a portable installation which is a big plus for me because I'm always jumping between laptops and desktops.
VirtuaWin allows you to arrange your screen in a grid or row, setup hotkeys to transition between the desktops, and several other features that I haven't had a chance to mess with.
I've experienced a few small issues with windows following me to other desktops and not working properly. I've only seen it happen with browser windows and IM windows. It's nothing major and it's not a huge annoyance.
The application runs only using 1.3m of memory in my processes and I haven't noticed any other applications being slowed down because of it.
VirtuaWin is THE application that helps me keep my sanity and stay organized when I'm have to work with a single screen.