Gadgets can be helpful depending on a user’s work situation. Gadgets are available for all kinds of tasks from displaying hardware information to Internet search forms and multimedia players.

This article reviews five desktop gadgets that are hardware related. Their usage as well depends on the user’s situation. A desktop computer users will not necessarily run a gadget that is displaying the remaining battery power while a netbook user might not be interested in the a gadget that displays the load of each cpu core.

Notebook Info 2

The name of the gadget already implies that it has been designed for mobile computer systems like netbooks or notebooks. It can display a variety of information including battery level and status, WiFi network status, cpu and ram usage, power-plans, uptime, a clock, alarm and calendar and more.

The settings can be used to display only the relevant items on the computer desktop. It is for instance possible to get rid of the calendar if that is not needed.

download it here

All CPU Meter

This gadget displays cpu related information including the used, free and total computer memory and the load on each cpu core. It did however detect eight cores on our quad-core test system.

download it here

Drives Meter

Can display hard drive information like the number of used, free and total space of each hard drive. A total of six hard drive partitions can be configured in the gadget’s options.

download it here

Wired Network Meter

This gadget displays many network information like the internal and external IP address or the up and downstream of the selected network adapter.

download it here

Wireless Network Meter

From the same developer as the wired network meter but created for wireless connections. It displays the same information as the wired network meter plus information about the connection (secure, not secure) and the signal.

download it here

The gadgets should be compatible with both Windows Vista and Windows 7. Interested users can browse the more than 3800 gadgets offered at the Windows Live Gallery for other gadgets.

What’s your take on Windows gadgets? Are you using them at all? If so, which are you using?

I had deleted the downloaded gadget installation file but noticed that the gadget was still listed in the gadget list. Figured that it had to be stored somewhere if it appeared in that list and decided to search for the gadgets location in Windows.

Turns out there is more than one location where Windows 7 and Windows Vista are storing gadgets. The common locations for saving gadgets in Windows are either Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets or Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets.

The third party gadget that I had installed was stored in the AppData folder where all third party gadgets had been saved by Windows. Each gadget is stored in its own folder and it is possible to copy that folder and add it to another Windows installation so that the gadget becomes available there as well.

Hope this helps anyone running Windows Vista or Windows 7 to locate the gadgets in their operating system as well.

Many Windows Vista users like the Windows Sidebar, others feel that it is to restricted to one part of the screen. Microsoft has already announced that they will change that behavior in Windows 7 so that users can place gadgets wherever they want on the desktop.

It was only a matter of time until someone would port the Windows Vista Sidebar to Windows XP. Joshoon managed to port the real Windows Sidebar to Windows XP by making use of Alky For Applications. You might remember Alky from the time when Windows Vista came out. That was at the same time when Microsoft announced Vista only applications and Alky was supposed to make them compatible with Windows XP (like the games Shadowrun or Halo 2)

The pack includes three different applications that are needed to install, display and maintain the Windows Vista Sidebar in Windows XP. First there is Alky For Applications which can simply be installed. Once that is done the Windows Vista Sidebar can be installed and will be operational afterwards. The pack comes with many gadgets and a tool called Gadget Gallery which can be used to add new gadgets to the sidebar.

Already available gadgets can be added by right-clicking the sidebar and selecting a gadget from the list of installed gadgets. Each gadget can be added by right-clicking it and selecting Add from the context menu.

Even more interesting than this is the ability to download gadgets from the Windows Vista Gallery site over at Microsoft. It requires some manual work but it’s easily done and works perfectly fine. The gadget needs to be downloaded and unpacked. It comes with the .gadget extension but it can easily be unpacked by most unpackers. Worked fine with 7-zip.

The directory that will be created by unpacking the .gadget file, adding the .gadget extension to the root directory of it and moving it to the Shared Gadgets directory of the sidebar application.

One interesting feature is the ability to detach a gadget from the sidebar so that it can be moved freely around on the desktop.

The Sidebar requires roughly 20 Megabytes of computer memory when displaying the default three gadgets.