One of the best things about the Mac OS is the built in Sticky Note feature.  When you're stuck on a PC though you're always taking little notes on post-its and sticking them all over your monitor.  Primitive.  I started searching for a free sticky note utility on cnet and found a ton but none were as simple or looked as good as the Mac utility.  But a google search turned up a nice little tweak on pcworld.com.  That tutorial was all text and was a bit confusing at first so I decided to make up my own tutorial.  And I use pictures!  Let's begin shall we? 

(Note:  This works in Win98, W2K, and XP.  All my instructions and screenshots are for XP.)

The first thing you have to do is open a folder.  Any old folder.  Go to Tools, then Folder Options.  Click the New button to create a new extension. In the Create New Extension dialogue box type stky.  Click OK to close this box.

Now back in the Folder Options box and with your new .stky extension selected, click the Advanced button.

Type Sticky Note in the first field. And then click New to open the New Action dialogue box.

In the New Action dialogue box, type open in the Action field and notepad.exe in the Application used to perform action field.  Click OK when you're done.

Now click Change Icon.

You can use any icon you want.  I found a small GIF on the web that I edited and converted to an icon file.  But you can use one of Windows' invisible icons.

Now OK and Close your way out of all the open dialogues.  All that's left is to edit your Registry a bit.  To open Regedit, click Start, Run and type regedit.  Hit Enter.  Click the + sign next to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and scroll around until you find the .stky extension you just made.  With it selected, right-click in the left hand pane.  Then select New, and Key.  Type ShellNew and hit Enter.

Now select the ShellNew folder and right click anywhere inside the right hand pane and select New and String Value.  Type NullFile and press Enter.  Exit Regedit.

The last thing you have to do is go back into a folder and turn off file extensions if you haven't already.  Go into a folder, go to Tools, and then Folder Options.  Turn on 'Hide extensions for known file types.'  (Note:  Personally,  I find it difficult to work without extensions on a PC.  If you're like me turn on 'Hide extensions for known file types' and hit OK.  Go to your desktop and right click to open the shortcut menu and create a new sticky.  Then come back into Folder Options and turn the extensions back on.  If you don't turn the extensions off, then on, the stickies won't work at all.  But once you've turned them off, created a sticky, and then turned extensions back on, everything is fine.  The only problem is that whenever you create a new sticky you have to be sure to retain the .stky file extension.  Annoying, I know.)

Now you're all set to start creating sticky notes! Go to your desktop and right click to open the shortcut menu!  Go to New and you should now be able to select Sticky Note.  (Note:  As mentioned earlier, I grabbed a GIF off the Web and created my own icon.)

Start writing stickies all over the place!  Since all we're doing here is taking advantage of Windows' support for long file names, keep in mind that you won't be able to use any special characters when writing your stickies.  But if you need to use special characters or want to type a lot more information then simply double click on your sticky.  Notepad will open and you can type all you want!  SWEET!

Nice!

Have fun making your own sticky notes!