I occasionally use Dashboard, so I don't have anything visible 99% of the time. My Dock hides itself as well.

I use the Windows one at work and occasionally at home.

I have my dock on the side, but I don't have a sidebar really. PIE! FTW.

Edd

i have the windows vista one, which ive filled with handy monitoring utilities (clock, system info, bandwidth, graphics card info etc). all this takes a few seconds to load, so i delayed it using a .bat file

on a sad note, win7 doesnt have a sidebar!! its just gadgets, which you can only stick on the desktop under the programs you are using, useless for clocks/monitors as you have to minimize your windows to see them. i really dont understand since you can do this with the vista sidebar apps anyway!!! thankfully it can be hacked in by copying the folders across (one in appdata and one in program files), but it should already be there in the first place

There is a little box on the bottom right os the screen inWindows 7 which, if you hover your mouse on it, will cause all of your open windows to become transparent allowing you to view your gadgets.

Or you could stick all your widgets on the side and have all your app windows not covering that part of the desktop?

A lot of the monitoring stuff I stick onto my task bar out the way

i know, but its still not as convenient as just being able to look at them



hm, that could work, but im very OCD so id have to line up every single app window perfectly, which i have neither time nor patience to do

for me atleast, the hack just makes more sense, might have some fun bullying it into working aswell, thank you both for your input though

None

I use a "modded" (read Black edition ) version of XP on my laptop, and that has a sidebar that is permanently bloody on. Gets on my nerves.

Don't use them on vista, so its a big fat PIE from me.

Dashboard was what I was trying to remember. I knew it had a name.

Basically, I mean the thing you stick widgets on - which is why I also asked which widgets you use



Is that Rainlender by any chance? I actually think it's rather good, and I have it on my media centre for decoration. I like the transparency options. It's easy enough to turn off, but it doesn't use many resources and it doesn't crash all the time... so completely unlike the Google one.

I tried all of the aforementioned sidebars, but found it took up far too much of my screen space. Therefore, "Pie" is the most relevant option for me

Peter.

@JJW,

No its not unfortunately. The dude who built this has implemented a Vista compatibility layer or something, and its running the official Windows sidebar.

Other than that, this distro is awesome! Although I really shouldn't talk about it here, as it's piracy apparently.

Before you all start, I used a key changer to use the XP Pro key I got off my old laptop. So its legal-ish. :p

I've never found anything to be quite so intrusive as a sidebar.

Apart from that sodding paperclip that is.

PIE!