Rants and Raves

There’s a ton of sidebar gadgets for Vista (just open up the gallery with “add gadgets” and select the “Get more gadgets online” link at the bottom right hand corner to have a look at the ones on Microsoft’s gadget site…

Needless to say, most of the gadgets are CRAP, in fact, most of the gadgets that ship with Vista are lame — and to illustrate that, I don’t use ANY of the gadgets that shipped with Vista.

The clock in Vista takes too much room and only shows the time.  A better solution is the 12HourTime gadget, it shows the time, day of the week and date in about 2/3 the space.

The CPU meter tha ships with Vista is also lame, the mCPU meter seems to do a good job (especially for multi-core CPUs).

And because we’re all too lazy to get up and look out the window… the Weather Channel gadget does a great job at telling you the current conditions (at a reporting station near you).

There are several other gadgets that you might enable from time to time when you’re doing something… the uTorrent monitor, MSNGasPrice, AstronomyCenter, etc all could be useful — and of course that also depends on your interests.

One of the nice things about gadgets is that you can remove them fairly easily, and unlike lots of software they don’t pollute your system.

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