Top 10 Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets

Best Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets Collection

In Windows Vista Microsoft Introduced a new Features Sidebar Gadgets, which are really cool and very useful too. By default, Microsot Windows Vista comes with a handful of Gadgets in the Sidebar. These Gadgets include things like a clock, a calendar, a picture slideshow, the local weather, etc. But you can add and remove some more cool gadgets into the sidebar. So am here posting some of the best Widgets for the Vista.

1. SD Sidebar Clock

I am going to start with clock which is on top of my sidebar, Sd sidebar clock is best replacement for stock sidebar clock it looks more than cool and have many more to show than a clock, it tells you time like normal clocks but at its background there is date, year, day, month mentioned and time in digital format, cool :)

Download

2. Multi Meter

Multi Meter is still the best CPU and Memory Usage monitor, it supports Single Core / Dual Core / Quad Core processors displaying each core seperately. No complaints about the effectiveness of this gadget… just could be ‘purdier ‘:)

Download

3. Windows Media Player Gadget

This is a nice alternative for those who prefer Media Player over iTunes. One of the nice things about this gadget is that it doesn’t ever need to actually launch Media Player itself. You can open & navigate your songs (plus videos!) all from it’s neat small size on the sidebar. When you detach the gadget it expands to show a video window and playlist controls. It also has a huge number of configuration options and controls for play speed and a plugin menu which is empty at the moment, but it will be interesting to see what that is used for in the future.

Download


4. Drive Info

A very useful sidebar gadget works very good with my hard drives, Drive Info let you put your HDD drives into sidebar for easy access along with a shortcut it shows usage bar which let you see how much space left in the partition. You can see left space in percentage and in gb’s you can select from many background colors in options and assign drive for shortcut. You have to put this gadget multiple times in sidebar if you are using more than one drive.

Download


5. Up time

This gadget shows uptime of your machine, total time from when your computer is running on, in days to hours to minutes to seconds a nice looking gadget and very useful too when your computer is running from a long time and you want to see how much time was that actually.

Download


6. Now Playing

Now playing is a cool gadget that shows album art of the song that’s currently playing in the side bar when player is minimized or in the tray and supports many famous media players, when you activate this gadget it shows which player to choose, when you choose one only album art pictures shows on the sidebar which sounds good.

Download


7. Winamp Remote

One of my favorite sidebar gadget from the list, it is so much much useful when you use winamp and you drag all thousand songs into your winamp playlist and juggle them a lot so this gadget help you doing all this rite from your sidebar without maximizing winamp and do the stuff, it shows song name when song is playing and launch winamp when click one time on it also let you control volume and song seeking. You can choose from 2 skins for gadget winamp modern and classic. This gadget also works with KM player.

Installation: extract zip then open install32.bat for 32bit vista and install64.bat for 64bit vista.

Download


8. Network Activity

Display network activity in real time. It displays two bars (TX/RX) that show your current thoughput. These bars have a text overlay showing you the exact speed that is being acheived. This is a very light weight gadget and has a settings menu that allows you to assign the network card and sampling interval that you are comfortable with.

Download


9. Computer Status

See the status of your Computer/Notebook in the Sidebar and on a SideShow device. View CPU, RAM, WiFi, Battery and Recycle Bin status. It also includes a Radio and the Date.

Download


10. Terror Alert

This Windows Sidebar gadget displays the current level of the Homeland Security Advisory System on your sidebar. This is the initial version, and I finally will have some time to expand on this as well as create different versions for other locations (many have asked for UK).

Download


Hope you liked this Windows Vista sidebar gadgets. You can also try:

Windows Firewall profile- Primarily geared for network troubleshooting.The Windows Firewall Profile is a system-wide setting dynamically derived from the network connection state and attributes. This setting dictates the machine’s effective firewall’s policy.
Knowing the current firewall profile indicates the effective firewall policy (and hence the attack surface size) to the user and also assists in troubleshooting.

TOP – Vista Shutdown Control - With this gadget you can shutdown, restart or lock your computer with only one click. Furthermore it shows the time and you can change the design. Check it out!

YouTube Video Downloader- A simple sidebar gadget to download YouTube video. Just enter the URL(The address of the page where you are watching the YouTube video[only youtube site please for this version]) and download the video in flv format. Use VLC Media Player or FLV Player to watch it.

Remove Drive Safely v1.2- Here is the gadget that will help you to disconnect your usb, SATA, eSATA drives (like Safely Remove Hardware tool).
Vista Calculator- Do you play with numbers? If yes vista calculator is for you its simple and easy to use calculator for sidebar, when you do normal calculation eventually you have to open calculator or use your brain lol.. but this is an alternative its calculator on your desktop. When you dis attach it from sidebar it show more calculating options but when intact its simple enough to do regular addition, subtraction, division, multiplication more it looks cool and more geeky.


If you know any other great sidebar gadgets i would like to hear your suggestions.