Windows Vista Sidebar Tips and Tricks

Like most new Vista features, Sidebar is crawling with tips and tricks. Here are a few of the biggies:

• You can open more than one copy of the same gadget. Just double-click its icon more than once in the Gadget Bar. You wind up with multiple copies of it on your screen: three Clocks, two Weather trackers, or whatever. That's a useful trick when, for example, you want to track the time or weather in more than one city, or when you maintain two different stock portfolios.

• If you point to a gadget without clicking, two or three tiny icons appear to its right. One is the X (Close button), which you've already met. The one that looks like a tiny wrench opens the gadget's Settings dialog box, where, for example, you can specify which stocks you want to track, or which town's weather you want to see. The third one, a tiny grid, is a "grip strip" that lets you drag the gadget to a new spot on the screen.

• Once the Sidebar is open, you can "tab" your way through the gadgets, highlighting one after another, by repeatedly pressing (window key) +G. When a certain gadget is highlighted, you can manipulate it. Close it, for example, by pressing Alt+F4.

• The "Search all gadgets" box (top right of the Gadget Gallery) lets you jump directly to a certain gadget, of coursea real sanity saver for the hard-core gadget collector. But if you click the (window key) to its right, the pop-up menu lets you restrict your search to only "Recently installed gadgets" or gadgets that came from Microsoft itself (choose "Microsoft Corporations").

• Many of the gadgets require an Internet connection, preferably an always-on connection like a cable modem.

• Ordinarily, your everyday work windows are allowed to cover up the Sidebar and its gadgets. If you have two monitors, though, or one really huge one, you can reverse that logic; you can tell Vista to put the gadgets on top of all other windows.

  To do that, choose Start->Control Panel->Classic View->Windows Sidebar Properties. Turn on "Sidebar is always on top of other windows."