Vista Sidebar Gadgets Reloaded – Top 20 Sidebar Gadgets 21
So only a short time ago I posted what I thought were the Top 10 Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets. The article has quickly become the most popular the site has ever had! No doubt caused by the retail release of Vista rather than the quality of the article 
However, in the time since then a real acceleration of gadget releases, and a couple of slipups by me has made we want to re-write the article to include some fantastic new entries and correct a couple of mistakes I made.
I’ am taking a different tack too, as there are some good (or even better) alternatives to those I posted in the last list and thus I am breaking them down into some categories too. Hit the jump to see the full list!
As always if you find some better alternatives please let us know in the comments section below!
Music / Multimedia Gadgets
FavouriteiTunes Controller
The favourite is still the iTunes controller. It is a slick first release with everything you could want from the gadget except for two things. 1) Needing to launch iTunes – it would be nice if the gadget could be used without having to launch iTunes itself (like the Windows Media Player gadget below). Anyone who has iTunes installed on Vista knows that often it runs like an absolute dog! 2. Playlist control – a nice little dropdown or navigation buttons for the playlists would make this gadget complete.
Other Contenders
Windows Media Player Gadget 2.0
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.
Weather Gadgets
Favourite
The favourite award still goes to the included Vista Weather gadget. It really is a great example of what a gadget should do. It succeeds despite the tough competition below because of its huge selection of weather stations. I live in a place with a population of only a few thousand (at most!) in the sparsely populated north of Sweden. Yet there is still a weather station selectable within 5km of the house! It takes so little space to display a lot of information, yet is detachable to be made larger and provide a 3 day forecast. Top class, but with increasing competition from several gadgets released only in the last few days.
Other Contenders
Now this weather gadget has a lot more functionality than the Vista one, but fails me for it’s poor selection of weatherstations. The list looks good if you are in the states, but it seems like only airports and major cities are covered elsewhere in the world. The nearest to me is a good 70km away and thus not much use. However it is very nicely designed, has current, 1 day & 3 day forecasts, satellite maps and even cameras! If you live near one of the stations included you will prefer this gadget, it’s really nice!
Gaming Gadgets
No favourites as such in this category, just several nice gadgets for different functions.
Xbox Live Gamercard Gadget by Nazul
Does what it says on the tin! Displays your Xbox Live Gamercard in one of 3 selectable sizes. Doesn’t have any great productivity uses but is a nice reminder of your uberness (or awfulness)
A great little utility for monitoring up to three of your favourite gaming servers. The games supported are the usual suspects such as CS:S, CoD, America’s Army, etc and the gadget reports number of players and whether the server is up or down. It would be nice to see some of the newer games supported too such as BF2142 and so on… but it’s a great start and I am sure it will add more supported games soon.
Network Gadgets
Favourite
A new favourite here release in the last couple of days and it is a very nice network monitor. For a start it looks a bit better than the one below (though some may not like the NIC name scrolling back and forth, it does solve a formatting problem in a fixed space for NIC’s with long names), overall it seems more responsive and loads instantly on boot.
Other Contenders
Though the gadget works well enough once loaded, it does seem to take a good 30 seconds or so to load up properly sometimes on boot, which means also that the rest of your gadgets (those below it on the bar) don’t load until after it. That’s a niggly little bug that relegates it to second place in terms of NIC monitoring gadgets. Otherwise it is decent enough and if you don’t like the comparitive flashyness of the ******* then you may prefer this one
Although there is other ways of monitoring a wireless connection within windows (such as the system tray icon) I like this one as I am one person who always seems to be cursed with a dodgy wireless connection that fluctuates in signal strength greatly even when the PC and the router are stationary! So I really like this gadget as it’s clear and easy to see the information you need at a glance. It’s perhaps a little big but it works great
Displays your public IP address. Very useful if you are on DSL and have a provider that gives you a dynamic IP instead of a static one.
System Monitoring Gadgets
This list stays essentially the same as the original Top10 List. Thought there is a new boy in town in the blister packs.
Favourites
Multi Meter is still the best CPU and Memory Usage monitor, while it doesn’t have quite the beauty of the Blister gadgets (below), 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 ‘:)
Monitor the disk space of up to 4 hard disks (or mapped network shares). No other does it in so little space and so flexibly. It also fits nicely with the design of Multi Meter!
Other Contenders
This is a nice looking and highly customisable (in terms of appearance) CPU monitor that lacks only in one department… it only displays a single meter regardless of how many cores your CPU has. I think it would be more space efficient on the sidebar too if was to combine with the seperately downloadable RAM meter. Add the support for multicore processors – it’s important for those of us who do a lot of virtualisation work!
As mentioned above, would be nice to combine with the CPU gadget, but apart from that it looks great (and again highly configurable). I don’t personally use it as I can get more information in a smaller space using only MultiMeter. But those with less gadgets or enormous resolutions may enjoy the extra gloss!
Radio Gadgets
Here is where I made a little boo-boo last time round. I actually had the BBC’s own gadget described and installed, but linked to and showed an image of another good (some may think better!) radio gadget. My favourite is the BBC’s gadget as it is bug-free and prettier.
Favourite
Listen to any of a multitude of BBC radio stations straight from the sidebar! A godsend for this ex-pat stuck up in the north of Sweden when I want some home news and ENGLISH language Stations include Radio 1,2,3, and 4, World Service and 5 Live
Other Contenders
Even though this gadget has a wider selection of UK radio stations to choose from (Virgin, etc), I prefer the BBC version because it looks better and because this UK Radio Player has a few bugs like not displaying the station correctly. Still it does work and is an excellent choice if you prefer function over eye-candy.
Misc Gadgets
A godsend for those that used to like the MS Office toolbar for a little patch of shortcuts to common apps. I fill one iteration with my games shortcuts, then a second iteration with those little apps like calc, mspaint and Filezilla that I need constant access to all the time.
All in one gadget that monitors Outlook even when the program itself is closed. Shows Read/unread message counts, Calendar events (number configurable) and Tasks (again configurable). Having those little reminders at the side of the screen is great for those with a short attention span (like me).
Nice little gadget that logs you onto Gmail at boot and monitors your inbox. You can open mails by clicking on them of course and you are notified of new mail by a nice ‘Ding!’ Certainly beats keeping a browser window open and refreshing all day!
Saving perhaps the most technically impressive gadget till last… Systran is a translation gadget that supports translations between an incredible 12 languages! As with all computer based translations it isn’t perfect every time… but its pretty damn good as far as the English, French, Swedish and Spanish translations go I can verify! You can even paste in whole passages of text! Also includes a dictionary mode… nice!
No related posts.
If you are interested in making your own gadgets, try http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/default.aspx?ForumGroupID=296&SiteID=1.
Other useful sites are:
http://www.gadgettutorials.com/ it has links to all the latest sidebar gadget tutorials and news, which are also available as a feed.
http://blogs.msdn.com/sidebar/default.aspx is the blog of the sidebar team – expert advice.
Please could you tell me how to restore the sidebar default setting?
I have moved the clock and calendar and now cannot get them back.
Adding gadgets back to the sidebar is easy.
1. Click the + symbol at the very top of the sidebar
2. Double click on the gadget you want to add
3. Voila
Wow, just spotted your review of my UK Radio Player gadget. You’ll be glad to know that the bug has been fixed so it always displays the right title, and there have been improvements/new features. Also, the link from the image of UKRP goes to the BBC gadget. I hope you like the updated UK Radio Player 1.2.5
Thanks for letting us know
This list is already getting way out of date, but I have always linked to the dl page on MS’s site. So should people follow that link they will get taken to the latest version.
Trying my best to use sidebar well.
Can you get all domestic BBC stations on Sweden? I am in Norway and can only get World Service through gadget.
Sad to see no Norwegian on Systran.
To be honest Maurice I havent tried in a while. I used to have problems listening to 606 football commentary because the stream is still coming from the BBC and its at that point that your IP address is registered for the stream.
I am currently sidebar-less now! Instead I am trying out Yahoo widgets instead so expect to see an article soon!
I use to have that Wireless Network Monitor but my hard drive crashed and I cannot get it back. The links never work for it when I see it again. I was in love with that one. If anyone has the install for it please let me know!
You are right, the link is now dead. I did a quick search and came up with these 4 of which the 1st one looks the most similar (though a different image used for the signal)
http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?bt=1&q=wireless%20network%20monitor
Can anyone tell me how to make the vista sidebar wider so that the gadgets are bigger etc
thanks alot =]
I have just created a TV Gadget – not as cool as all yours here though. I will learn from you and make it better.
Mine is at http://www.software-dungeon.co.uk/software.php?id=107188
Hi!
I was wounderin if anyone can help me. I am looking for a radio gadget that I had befor but somhow lost it. All I know is that it wasblack/dark it had more than 30 stations to choose from and if you were listening to a station you could press on the gadget and a webpage whit the songs lyrics would apear.
Pleas help me find this gadget. You can write to me on my email: emiros@hotmail.com
There’s some good ones here: http://www.uniquewg.com/
The reggelreTalkClock is an customizable talking alarm clock and system scheduler:
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=4e8555e7-f2de-490c-9e7c-d3344f70492c
Dailysnooze Gadgets have a great vista sidebar gadget (also works on Windows 7) – there is a BBC News gadget and a BBC Weather gadget. They are really good! Check out http://www.dailysnooze-gadgets.com .. nice!
ive tried so many radio gadgets and have decided i like the uk radio player best… there is a theming option, which can make it look pretty, and also a flyout info pane to let you know what you are listening to
fabbo and thanks for pointing me in its direction 
Hi, I’m the creator of the Blister(WDG) series; thanks for the mention! You can get all my Blister gadgets at http://cv.xanderlih.com/blister.aspx
Included are the standard CPU and RAM meters mentioned in the article, as well as a Multi-CPU meter and a Hard Drive or Partition Meter with Activity Indicator. Thanks again
Hey,
As creator of iCalendar Plus I feel that it should be in this list. It is a calendar/agenda gadget which is compatable with practically all calendar applications (Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook etc).
Please check it out (click my name) and let me know what you think.
Consider yourself now recommended
I just looked at your gadgets that you picked for the top 20.. What did you do? Just pick the first Gadget you saw for each category?
*sigh*
*** HERE IS A LIST OF GADGETS YOU SHOULD HAVE ON YOUR SYSTEM ***
1: All CPU meter – by now you probably have a Dual Core processor in your system. One thing that the CPU gauge that is loaded with the sidebar by default does not do is shows what each processor is doing. This gadget will show you the activity of your memory and all your cores.
2: Accuweather Mini is the gadget I recommend. It is small and not bloated like some of the other weather gadgets
3: PING Gadget – This gadget has two advantages. The first advantage is you can have it constantly ping a website (such as google.ca) to monitor your net connection should your internet ever go down this gadget will be the first to let you know. The second advantage is for Gamers as they can monitor their ping.
4: Wired Network Meter – this gadget works with both wired and wireless. The gadget will display the activity of your internet connection when you are downloading and uploading. It can also be used as a spyware monitor as well – if you are not doing any uploading but the gadget says that you are, perhaps you have something running in the background.
5: Google Gadget (self explanatory)
6: System Animator – by far my favorite gadget. When your computer is active the gadget displays an animation. By default its Anime but you can change it to the matrix code so when your computer is doing a very demanding task the matrix code will be running down the screen really fast.
7: System Uptime Monitor – for those who leave the computer on 24/7 and try to break records for the longest time the computer has been on without restarting.
8: Launch Controller – My personal favorite gadget. What this gadget does is acts like a quick launch. You can customize shortcuts into groups (One for Utilities, one for Applications) The reason why I like this gadget is because I like to have 0 icons on the desktop, and I do not like to have my taskbar cluttered with millions of shortcuts.
9: Drive Activity – for those who have multiple hard drives this gadget is especially useful. When you see HD activity via the LED on the case, and you are unsure as to why activity is occurring this gadget will at the least let you see which hard drive is active. 95% of the time there should be little to no activity in here unless you are loading an application, watching a movie or playing a game.
10: iCalendar – this gadget I found was the simplest to use for reminders
These are all the gadgets that I use on my computer I have 6GB of RAM and the Sidebar only takes of 70k. You might have to increase you resolution to 1680 x 1050 in order to have all the gadgets on the right side without cluttering the rest of your screen.
Oh BTW.. MARK.. I was just reading your comment – guess you are in the list now.
Thanks for your info but not much gadget in sidebar compare to google desktop – both consume lots of resources…