yep its pretty good here to but my bike is buried in the garage so no chance of a quick blast unfortunately.
I have been doing a bit of research myself since you posted as I may upgrade my own stock reg rec this year.
i read Hughs guide and also Petes on his DIY solution .
To my mind we might as well just take a fully built encapsulated regulator rectifier used on some of the modern 650,750.850,bikes around. it does exactly the same job on all bikes. you just need to make sure it can cope with the load you have on your bike ie electrically heated seat and gloves and TV CD headunit, GPS etc
The trick is finding a circuit diagram so that you can see which wires on the new reg/rec connect to which wires on our XS650.
Obviously the three white wires from the replacement Reg/Rec are straightforward.
Then you'll need to connect one of the other wires to the red wire which is fed from the battery via a 20A fuse. (This also supplies the ignition switch)
The second wire needs to connect to the green wire that goes to the inner stator brush
the last wire needs to connect to the brown wire which goes to the other side of the ignition switch . The brown wire is a switch live wire which feeds the reg/rect when the ignition is switched on wheras the red wire from the 20A fuse is constantly live from the battery.
Whichever rectifier regulator you choose there should be a specification and electrical diagram available for it to show which of the 3 wires connect to the three wires on your connector