This handy sidebar comes with a few useful functions. An analog clock, performance meters for checking CPU / Memory usage / Disk activity / Swap file usage / Active Apps / Network activity and disk usage. A calendar, quick link to your media player, volume control, quick launch, system tray, slideshow, recycle bin, clean system, weather summary, file browser, e-mail checker and a Newsroom where you can add RSS feeds. Plus an assortment of skins and plug-ins you can add. Unfortunately to add some of these plug-ins you need NET. Framework (Shriek) installed. This sidebar can be customized any way you want it, the help file does a pretty good job of explaining things.

In general terms, I was extremely impressed. This sidebar is full of surprises, here are just a few functions. Place the sidebar on the right or left sides of the desktop or have it float. Lock it down or autohide. Stretch the size of bar. Open and close panels. Undock panels ( To re-dock the panel on bar - you need to drag and drop it back on to bar ). Hovering over a panel will pop open another window with information. Right click on a panel for properties where you can change the panel settings; or for instance: right click the windows media player - it brings up the entire menu (Very Kewl). Two items that bugged me. First, after installation and startup, the bar opened up by default on the rightside and shoved all the icons to the left. No problem, thanks to icon restore I was able to rectify that situation. In order to correct this problem, at the top of Sidebar right or left click and open up options. Click open ( appearance ) go to position section and change ( Z-order ) from always on top to normal or on desktop. This setting prevents the icons from being blasted to the port side every time the sidebar opens. Second, I set the program to run when Windows starts. This program needs time to load and it caused all kinds of flickering on the desktop, the icons flickered like a pinball machine. To me this is annoying. So, now I just open Sidebar from quick start. Other than these two minor irritations, I'll give this application four stars out of five.

As always... have fun. Cheers and Beers !

Blupwrdup

Here is a desktop snapshot of what SideBar looks like with slideshow open.