“Add a smart toolbar to the side of your desktop”

SmartBarXP is a bar that runs down the side of your screen, and can be configured to display interactive panels known as 'panes'. These panes include media players, slideshow and image viewing panes, a virtual desktop manager, and live news, weather and stock feeds, to mention but a few.

The panes can be repositioned on the bar, and scrolled if the bar becomes too full. The bar can also host extra sections, including a recycle bin, Explorer shortcuts, and taskbar replacement sections (start button, taskbar buttons and system tray sections).

SmartBarXP can be fully customizable in almost every aspect you can think of. Every pane has extensive options and can be tweaked to look and work just the way you want it to. The bar itself can be customized too, with options for positioning, auto hiding, pane scrolling, fading and translucency effects, and changing the language and regional settings.

You can also select the theme the bar takes on, to match your current Windows XP theme, the Classic Windows theme, or even use a third party SmartBarXP theme. This helps give you scope to transform the panel into anything you want it to be.