vDesk

Having to work with multiple applications at the same time can be quite stressful, especially if some of them are risky or they consume a large amount of system resources. As a solution, you can make use of a virtual operating system, which can provide you with all the basic utilities you might need in order to edit text, enjoy multimedia content and surf the Internet.

vDesk is a software utility designed to emulate a fully-functional operating system, by providing you with a wide variety of useful tools and applications that aim to offer you a complete working environment. Thus, you are able to write text, watch videos and surf the Internet without affecting your actual system.

You can also make use of the included text-to-speech capabilities, as well as the simple picture viewer that enables you to open and view images from your computer. Although these utilities are very simple and they lack any form of settings, their purpose is to provide you with a way to enjoy any form of media, including videos, pictures and web content.

All of the previously mentioned utilities can be opened and used at the same time, allowing you to multitask between them and achieve more than one thing at once. Despite that, it is worth nothing that, although you can have more than one window opened inside the virtual desktop, the application still creates multiple instances of itself in order to hold them, which means that you sometimes need to use the Alt-Tab shortcut to switch between them, since vDesk does not offer you this possibility.

None of the documents you open or create can be saved, which is also true for text files. Hence, in order to keep their content, you need to go outside the application and transfer it to another editor. Moreover, beside the already provided tools, the rest of your computer is not accessible from within the virtual environment, except for when you are trying to open media files.

VDesk is brings a mixture of benefits and drawbacks when it comes to functionality. Thus, while some features are very helpful, others come with annoying downsides that do not make the application a particularly viable solution. Despite that, the interface is very easy-to-use and intuitive, since it simulates a classical operating system look, with a taskbar and a main menu that allows you to access the desired tools.