Pandora is a great service for all music lovers.
If you want to access Pandora on your desktop, you should grab the Pandora Gadget for Vista, because it’s working on Windows 7 as well
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Download Pandora Gadget
- The official pandora gadget can be found here
Pandora Gadget on Windows 7 x64
If you are running Windows 7 x64 like me, you will have to tweak your system a little bit. Because Adobe did not add x64 support for flash you won’t be able to use the gadget on your x64 system without enabling the x32 gadget sidebar.
To enable the x32 Gadget sidebar, simply do this:
- In the System Tray right-click on the Gadget Sidebar Icon. Click on Properties!
- Make sure to uncheck the “Start Sidebar when Windows starts” option
- Open the Explorer and Browse to C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Sidebar
- Go to Start – All Programs and right-click on the folder “Startup”. Open it in a new window.
- Now drag and drop the sidebar.exe from C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Sidebar into the startup folder
- Voilà, now the Windows x32 Sidebar will auto-start whenever you log into Windows
Btw, the screenshot above is of an old Pandora Gadget and not the official one. The official Pandora gagdget will look slightly different!
I have installed the official Pandora gadget on my x64 Win 7 computer. Unfortunately, I don’t see it popping up in my System Tray. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Gadgets are located in a menu accessed by right-clicking your desktop. Select ‘Gadgets’ and you should see it there.
Thanks for your response. I can pull that up. But I’m not sure that’s what I need to be doing to accomplish this.
The problem is that I’m unable to follow your above instructions. They worked fine when I was running Vista. Now, I have nothing to right-click. So, I don’t see “properties”. I can’t uncheck anything…and so on.
So, what do I right-click? Right-clicking on the pandora gadget or any of the icons in the bottom right of the screen by the clock…doesn’t work. The shaded bar surrounding the gadgets in Vista is absent, so right clicking near them is just like right clicking on the desktop anywhere else.
Thoughts? Thanks for your help.
There’s no option I could find to edit the sidebar startup properties in Win 7. But, if you’re comfortable editing the registry, you can change which version of sidebar.exe is loaded during startup to use the x86 / 32 bit version instead.
Go to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
Edit the key:
Sidebar
Change to:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe /autoRun
Reboot.
NOTE! You will lose all of your gadgets, and will have to re-add them, configure, etc.
Alternatively, you can disable sidebar.exe from loading by opening msconfig (Start > in the search box type: msconfig) and disabling it in the startup section. Then, simply add a shortcut to the Startup group to point to the x86 version of sidebar.
Is anyone else having trouble making this work with Windows 7? I have it up and it loads everytime but the gadget just says “The gadget requires Flash version 9,0,115,0 or greater.” there is a link for upgrade instructions which I followed and installed Flash 10. Still get the same message. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!
Ok people, for those that are confused let me explain. Windows uses the registry keys to tell it what programs to run when it starts, right now its running the sidebar in C:\Program Files and you want it to load C:\Program Files (x86) so that you can run the 32bit version.
SOOOO…. looks like your going to have to edit some stuff (all because windows did’nt put a button for us to right click instead of the sidebar(which isnt there in windows 7)
Edit the following Registry Key:
\\HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\SideBar
Change the key to this:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe /autoRun
(The only addition is loading sidebar.exe from c:\program files (x86)\ instead of c:\program files\)
This should get you by until Adobe gets their act together!
Wish there was a way to change the color of the gadget either by editing the ini file or an option to do this with the gadget itself.
I have windows 7 X86 and get the same error “The gadget requires Flash version 9,0,115,0 or greater.
so fixing it to run 32 bit does not apply as it IS 32 bit.
pandora works on IE8, win7 x64, natively if you install Flash Player “Square” x64 for IE
Thanks thjoca3,
Here is a copy of the link that lets you download the correct flash player in order to get Pandora to work.
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Adobe-Flash-Player-for-Windows-64bit/964714156/5
Good Luck!
Hey guys, Adobe has publish a beta version of the 64 bit player. Do you think you will be able to update the pandora player accordingly? Many of my other apps need the 64 bit even pandora works in 32.
Thanks for the info, works fine on Windows7 x64. I’m not sure why the old version of this gadget stopped working, but thanks for the update. :)
All you need to do to get pandora on windows 7 64 bit is to download a adobe lab version of flash
+1 Master-17: I just installed the Latest Lab version of flash and it works great under Win7 64 bit. Here’s a link to the lab to save ya some time:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_square.html