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The Official Post Your Desktop Thread

Does anyone know if there's a way to turn off the dark shading on the Vista sidebar but still have it permanently at the side of the screen?

Reply 1381

noaksey

Some of these backgrounds are amazing - especially the one with the huge ice-cream with the flake in it.

Reply 1382

Tom

15

Stick Man

Does anyone know if there's a way to turn off the dark shading on the Vista sidebar but still have it permanently at the side of the screen?

You can hide the sidebar itself while still having the gadgets running, if that's what you mean.

But to have the sidebar transparent but still 'there', I'm not sure how to do that. I think there might be third-party apps that allow you to change the sidebar skin though, possibly? That might do the trick....

Reply 1383

Mos Def

17

olileauk

right, i changed my wallpaper already

Spoiler

Howd you get all those nicely designed side bar stuff?

Mine....

Spoiler

Reply 1384

Angel Interceptor

11

Indeed oli, where did you get the hard disk capacity gadgets, and the core/RAM usage and BBC Radio gadgets? Links? :smile:

Reply 1385

omicronlyrae

11

here: http://vista.gallery.microsoft.com/vista/SideBar.aspx?mkt=en-us

Reply 1386

Mos Def

17

olileauk

here: http://vista.gallery.microsoft.com/vista/SideBar.aspx?mkt=en-us

cheers, but damn most of them really mess up my comp.

Reply 1387

Angel Interceptor

11

Cheers oli. Strange thing is that the hard disk one only works for one of my drives - any ideas what's going on? Perhaps it could be because my hard disk has two partitions (which have different drive letters) - it registers the C: partition fine, but not the D: partition...hmmm!

Reply 1388

omicronlyrae

11

Angel Interceptor

Cheers oli. Strange thing is that the hard disk one only works for one of my drives - any ideas what's going on? Perhaps it could be because my hard disk has two partitions (which have different drive letters) - it registers the C: partition fine, but not the D: partition...hmmm!

well first you have to select which drives are shown. Also, a number of people have had a few issues, so you may find it just doesn't work.

Reply 1389

Lara C.

3

i bet ive got the coolest desktop! :wink:

im using kworldclock which is a map of the world showing which parts are in daylight and those in nighttime. it updates itself every 5 minutes, very cool.

Reply 1390

Stick Man

11

Mine, with wallpaper nicked from above (thanks to Manalishi) and transparent sidebar (thanks to AI for the suggestion of looking for a thrid-party app)

http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/4346/desktopna2.gif

Reply 1391

Angel Interceptor

11

olileauk

well first you have to select which drives are shown. Also, a number of people have had a few issues, so you may find it just doesn't work.

It's working fine now; I realised that the problem was the partition not holding any data, which is a bug that meant that it didn't register.

Still, I'm not a huge fan of Windows SideBar - it seems like a clumsy solution for accessing information, since it constantly takes up some screen real estate for information that may not need to be accessed that frequently. I think that Dashboard/Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets approach is a far more elegant solution - a simple keyboard press to access the information you want, and another to make it disappear - much more elegant.

Reply 1392

omicronlyrae

11

i really like sidebar, mainly because it's one process and uses up far less RAM than Yahoo widgets, which i used to use. I agree that you should be able to press a button to hide it though, but i only use gadgets i find constantly useful.