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I am now running the Windows Vista sidebar in Windows XP. How to do it? Well, its not easy

Just follow the instructions here.

Basically, you download the Sidebar files, then download the patch. Copy the Parts folder to your created User\Parts folder, apply the patch, copy xmlrw.dll to your Sidebar folder, and run the Sidebar.

Now, as to the Gadgets that come with the Sidebar.

The first appears to just show random images from your hard drive. At the moment, it has no options to customize.

The second is an RSS headline display gadget. Currently, you can have one RSS feed, and a +/- sign determines whether you see one or four headlines.

The third is a clock. You can add a second hand, as I've done.

The fourth is a search box. It comes with MSN Search as the default, but you can change it easily by entering a search string.

You can specify the side of the monitor the Sidebar appears on, and which monitor it appears on (if you have multiples).

With all four default Gadgets running, you lose about 19 megabytes of RAM, pretty much on par with my Konfabulator experience. Objects can be removed from the Sidebar and be placed pretty much anywhere.

As you can see, its not exactly feature-rich at the moment. In fact, parts of it don't even work. But, if you are like me and are having fun getting your XP system to look like Vista (as mine does, thanks to WindowBlinds), then this is a worthy addition. Also, proof positive Gadgets work in XP, since anybody can get them right now.

Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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