Computers

Windows Installer Cleanup Utility

The link above points to a very nice little program to have in your toolbox of Windows fixing solutions. I was having a problem with uninstalling a version of Desktop Sidebar (picture on left). Add / Remove Programs wouldn't uninstall it. Trying to install a new version over the old one wouldn't work. Finally at one of the Desktop Sidebar forums, a user tipped me off to Windows Installer Cleanup Utility (see link above), which worked like a champ. It quickly deleted the offending registry entries and allowed me to install the new version of Desktop Sidebar (which is a very slick tool, by the way). Takes up minimum resources.

As shown in the picture to the left, you can have many various panels - weather, stock quotes, quick launch of programs, media player of choice (currently playing Neil Young's Crazy Horse), Performance panel monitoring disk usage, memory, cpu,etc, Run command panel, slideshow of pictures on your HD and from other places, Newsroom which will bring you all kinds of feeds from news sources, as well as RSS feeds. There are also many other panels and ways of configuring it. This panel sits on the right side of your desktop and can sit topmost or float or auto hide. As you hover over items, a larger picture will spring out providing you with more details. For instance, in the slideshow panel, hovering over the picture will make the full sized picture pop into view. As I've said, you can customize to your choosing. Quite slick.