Technically, this is not a &warpcenter; replacement... it does not replace the "SmartCenter" WPS class, since that class is completely undocumented in the first place. Instead, the &xcenter; is a new implementation from scratch. It is not compatible with the &warpcenter; and does not take over its settings, but it can do pretty much the same... and more.

Compared to the &warpcenter;, the &xcenter; offers you the following advantages:

• It is fully configurable. You can add items to the &xcenter; at your free will, while the &warpcenter; will always contain fixed items at fixed locations.

  The items in the &xcenter; are called "widgets". You can add widgets to the &xcenter; in any order.

  See "Adding and removing widgets" for details.

• You can have more than one &xcenter; on your system. Each &xcenter; stores its widgets and their settings separately so that they will never conflict.

• The &xcenter; offers you more display styles than the &warpcenter;. You can drag and drop fonts and colors onto the widgets, which will retain these settings individually. Besides, the &xcenter; has an "auto-hide" option so that it will reduce itself to a tiny bar at the bottom of the screen, similar to the task bar on Windows 95. You can set those display options in the &xcenter;'s settings notebook.

• The &xcenter; supports plug-in DLLs. Any programmer can add new widget types to the &xcenter; by writing a DLL and put it into the plugins\xcenter directory of the &xwp; installation directory.

  See "About plug-in DLLs" for details.

• The &xcenter; runs on a separate thread within the WPS and can thus run with a higher priority than other programs. You can set the priority in the &xcenter;'s settings notebook.

  While this cannot fix the PM single input queue (SIQ) problems, this can still give you access to the &xcenter; if some program uses up all CPU time.