Random

I like gadgets.  There I said it, I like them cluttering my desktop and providing at a glance information regarding my system, network, and things I am interested in.  It started off years ago with an addiction to some gadgets widget things (sorry cant remember the name of the company) which later got acquired by Yahoo and turned into Yahoo Widgets.   Great stuff, lots of time wasted and 99% of them were 100% useless.

So in the last 2 months I’ve had to reinstall 4 times.  First because I thought my system was getting bloated.  I thought after a year of running vista the Windows Bloat has finally caught up to me.  Little did I know it was my HDD failing and taking longer to access information but that’s another rant for another time.  So I went with vista64, figuring I’d see how much progress the 64bit community had made and if I’d notice any sort of performance gain with my video games.   Again that’s another rant for another time, to summarize, Yes I got to use all my memory, no I did not see a performance gain and yes I went back to vista32 bit.  Anyways, hard drive fails and I have to install a couple more times and each time I do I have to go search for the windows side bar applications I enjoyed so much.

The follow is a small list of windows side bar applications that I like having on my system.  This is primarily a list for me so I don’t have to hunt around again or remember what obscure name some of them are.

First is App Launcher, this little buddy works pretty much like the quick launch bar, just bigger and squared.  Nothing amazing about it except that I’ve come to enjoy my taskbar free of clutter using this helps me access applications I use frequently.

The next gadget is Clipboard Manager.  Nothing more then a visual representation of what text is in your clipboard, allowing you to quickly select previous text with a click.

Since I do a lot of gaming and run dual screens I like to see what kind of load a game is putting on my system.  Sounds dirty I know but that’s the nature of the beast.  I found this pretty sweet all in one gadget that monitors the CPU and RAM.  ALL CPU Meter supports both quad and dual core systems and in vista64 registered a full 4 gigs which I have installed.

The 4th and final must have gadget is a Network Meter, the author has created two versions, one for Wireless and one for Wired networks.  In short it shows your input and output as well as your external IP.

Ok, so thats what I roll.  There is one additional gadget I install, since I’m a huge WoW geek I use WoW Explorer which provides a quick glance at server status (Daggerspine for me) and allows me to search a variate of WoW databases.  Again, running dual screen is pretty sweet.

This was put together to help me find the gadgets I enjoy so when I have to reinstall again I can locate them quickly.  But I think anyone who reads this will agree that they are quite useful once you start using them.

-Duane