Microsoft Gadgets

Monday, December 7th, 2009 |

Microsoft is the largest software producer in the world, with over 50.000 employees in several countries. It delivers the largest number of operating systems for personal computers, and some MS Windows systems, in its many variants.

Besides the operating systems, Microsoft has on the market a lot of gadgets that make our life in front of computers more interesting.
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Speed test is one of Microsoft gadgets; this gadget shows you your hard drive activity and space, you can only see your battery charge status, your WiFi signal strength. You can download data transfers and you can upload them. This data information can be view in a graph mode and you have the possibility to see live what is happening or to see the results after. If you have something installed in your computer that slows him down you can see exactly what software make your computer slow down. You can personalize it by choosing between 73 backgrounds and 19 skins. You can monitor almost anything on your computer and it doesn’t take a lot of space on your sidebar. It has an intuitive interface and it is very easy to use.

You if are a person who likes to stay well informed and you look up a lot of information on the internet the next Microsoft gadgets is everything you need. All search gadget allows you to search for information in 10 different search engines: Yahoo, Wikipedia, eBay, Google, YouTube, Weather, Dictionary, News and Big. The gadget can be personalized with 16 colorful skins. It only works if your internet browser is Internet Explorer, it doesn’t work with Opera or Mozilla Firefox.

If you like to travel a lot or if you need to travel a lot and you don’t have the spear time to watch the weather channels on TV, the next gadgets is for you. WeatherBug is able to receive live weather conditions. With this gadget you will have weather conditions form anywhere in the world. You can get detailed radar, severe weather alerts, weather cameras and forecasts on your computer sidebar. The WeatherBug has 8.000 tracking stations, therefore you will always be well informed in the weather aspect.

Another Microsoft gadget is Side Player. This gadgets searches and plays about two million audio tracks. With this gadget you are able to listen and play any audio track from the desktop; you can do that without searching on the Internet or launching any type of browser. All the music is for free and you can search it using just the gadget.

With this gadget you don’t need to download music anymore, just type the name of the artist you want to hear or the name of a track and the SidePlayer will look up for it in about 20 seconds.

XM Online Radio is a gadget that allows you to listen to online radio, to search albums from eBay, YouTube or Amazon. It is a free gadget, with a friendly easy to use interface. You have full control of it: a Stop button, a Play button, Channels and Volume. If you want to find lyrics of a song it make an instant lookup, you can search up eBay products or more information about a song you are listening on Amazon.

If you like to keep track of your system information the SysInfo gadget can help you do that. This gadget uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to read the computer information. It is available in English and Hungarian, you can change between languages and you can adjust which information you want to see. You can modify the size of the gadget; it has a changeable font type. The gadget helps you bringing all the information together. At a glance of an eye you can see if your cpu is overworked or your disk is filling up.

System Control is a gadget that has many different functions including: Restart, Lock, Shutdown, Switch, Hibernate, Task Manager, Run, Control Panel, LogOff, Command Prompt, Sleep, User and Screensaver.  You have the possibility to re-order the button or to enable/disable them. You can customize it, because it comes with 10 themes, 5 different button styles and 3 types of sizes. It is powerful, sleek and small.

Ultimate Explorer is a gadget that allows you to search 50 websites right from your desktop. You can search Google, Digg, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay, Drugstore, PriceRunne, WatherBug and also your favorite social networks, news web sites, WoW sites and so much more. You have options for you search, custom configurations and themes. You are able to choose between 4 different themes, different sizes, calendar and events web search link groups, date and time. It is easy, clean and very simple to use.

Another gadget you might like is Messenger Gadget. The gadget is using Windows Live Messenger to get its information. This one has a few negative aspects, sometimes you will see that the gadget doesn’t show some contacts in the groups they should be. When you install the gadget, if you don’t have installed Windows Live Messenger on your computer you will that the gadget won’t work. This gadget allows you to see your contact’s status, to change your status and to start a chat session. It is easy to work with, just double-click on a contact if you want to start a conversation and if you want to modify a contact’s nickname just right-click on the contact.

These are some of the Microsoft gadgets you can find on the internet and that really work, but you can search for more if you haven’t found one to match your needs.

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Software Gadgets

Monday, December 7th, 2009 |

Kids these days grow up very fast, not physically but mentally. For the younger generation to a have a mobile phone is a must, to have a computer or a laptop is also a must and they think they can’t survive without them. They want the latest gadget and the best ones. The smarthphones are the best gadget they have these days, but as a parent do you actually know what your kid is doing with the phone? No, of course you don’t until you get the phone bill. NetNanny Mobile is a software gadget that can help parents to keep a closer eye on their children. This gadget offers parents the possibility the see what their kids are doing with the smartphone: for example parents can know where their kids are, if they are outside or they are home surfing the web pages.
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All you have to do is install this software gadget to have full control over the content of your kids’ smartphones. With the help of this amazing software gadget you can see the smartphone’s location round the clock, therefore you can see exactly were your kids are thanks to a GPS tracking system offered by Google Maps. Now you can know for sure if your kids say that they are going to study at a friend’s house if they are going to do that or they lied. No more secret parties, home runaways and lies, because if your kid has this software installed on his smartfphone, you will always know were he/she is. The software has many features including MMS and text messages on the handset, it is capable to browse through the photo album, to see what images your kids have taken, received or sent, view the content of e-mail and is also able to see the log of the voice conversations.

This is a good software for parents who have some problems with their teenagers, but if you trust your kid that is enough, because you don’t need a software to tell you the truth about where your kid was or what your kid did last night.

The technology advanced so much in the last few years, one example of advanced software is TXTBlocker, this software allows mobile phone users to disable some features while they are driving such as texting. You can block certain numbers, to disable the texting function or to permit only outgoing calls or incoming calls. You can also make a safe list; this is made from emergency numbers and only this numbers can be dialed while driving.  TXTBlocker is using geograohic algorithms and proprietary velocity to set in motion the settings you have selected. This software might solve the distracted driving problem, because there are more and more accidents are caused by talking at the phone while driving or texting while driving. And if the police is not a solution to stop the person for talking or texting while he/she is driving maybe this technology may be the solution. It is fully customizable; you can turn off or on certain function at any time. Once you have turned on TXTBlocker is going to work automatically so you don’t have to remember to turn it on when you can in the car. It has also safety features, which mean that the phone is able to cable 911 even if you are driving.

The information on yours computer should be private and if you want to stay like that you will need Phoenix Freeze. This is specially designed for notebooks or laptops, it provides to its users always-on Bluetooth proximity system. This system is able to lock down your laptop if you walk away from it. You don’t need a very expensive cell phone, you only need one that has a Bluetooth and of course a laptop or a notebook that has, also, a Bluetooth. With this software you don’t have to worry that others around will look in to your computer after you walk away from it, to drink a cafe or to smoke a cigarette. This saves you a lot of time, because you don’t have to lock and unlock the computer over and over again.

If you find this software gadget interesting, you should know that you can find another software application called FailSafe. This is an innovative software that allows you to trace the location of your laptop if I has been stolen. The software, also, allows you to erase all data on the hard drive or to lock down the hard drive.

Everyone wants an iPhone, is one of the most desirable gadgets on the market. The iPhone is locked on the AT&T network and if you want to choose other operator you can’t that without an unlock software. You can find on the market many software applications for iPhone unlock, one of this is Iphone Unlocking software. With this software you won’t have any loss of functionally or features, it enables the video recording, enables MMS messaging and you can use any GSM sim card. This iPhone unlocking software is able to unlock any iPhone and if you want to redo the process you can do it, because it is able to relock the iPhone at any time so your warranty on your iPhone can remain valid.

After you download it, the iPhone will be unlocked very fast and you will be able to use any network in just a few minutes.

This software is available for Windows and also for Mac computers.

You can find many software gadgets, many of them are not free but you can buy them just for fun or to amaze your friends with your latest software acquisition.

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Vista Gadget

Saturday, December 5th, 2009 |

Vista has many gadgets and in the next line you can read about some of them.

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One of the gadgets of Windows Vista is the Digital Dutch Clock 3.1. It has a lot of animations, day and date options and a digital clock. You can choose for a lot of skins, colors or fonts, you have option for the day setting, the date setting and the digital clock setting. It is a very useful gadget and it is fully customizable. If you first language is not English you can find the translation in Dutch, German and French. To restart the animation you must double-click on it and to select the next skin you must type Ctrl+Double-click.

The Quick Launch gadget can do many things for its users. Allows the person that installed on his computer to add shortcuts, to drag and drop files, to add folders, files, bookmarks. You can add almost anything onto this gadget for a quick launch. It has shortcuts button that is very easy to manage, it is very simple to use just drag and drop the files or folders to add shortcuts. The gadget has also a fully functional Recycle Bin and it is very easy to customize.

If you want to see what your computer is doing in the background, Vista has a gadget that shows you the top processes found on your system: Memory, IO (Bytes written/read) and some other processes that are consuming the most from your computers CPU.  By default is made to show the top 3 processes by CPU, but if you want to see more or less processes the gadget can the configured to do that. If you are not from England or USA, the gadget can help you with the Japanese, Russian and Italian translations. This gadget can help you find out what is going on when your computer seems to overload. You are able to see what your processes are doing and you don’t need to launch task manager to find out.

Wired Network MeterV3 is a Vista gadget that shows you the computers external IP address, the Internal IP address, the download speed, the upload speed, the total of usage and the IP lookup with Google maps. It is a useful gadget, but you can not change the font size, the graph lines or the color options for the text.

If you have a printer then you must have the next vista gadget: HP Photo Print Gadget with Smart Crop 2.0. When installed, the HP print gadget is default configured to print borderless photos and the photo size is 4″x 6″ if you are in North America and if you are in other regions the photo size is 10cm x 15cm. The gadget has an options button; this will help you if you want to change the print size, the paper tray settings, the paper type and also the default printer. This printer works with the drag and drop system, so if you want to print something all you have to do is drag and drop photos from supported applications, web browser or file folders. You can do that with one or many photos.

The printer will detect the orientation of the photos you have selected (landscape or portrait) and them will send the photos to the printer.

If you are a fun of Twitter, you can find a Twitter Explorer gadget. This one is an excellent toll if you want to keep up your Twitter messages. It has a nice interface that is very easy to use; it allows you to view recent mentions and activity. You can post replies and messages. It can be customized because it has a lot of themes and multiple sizes.

Everyone bought something from eBay even once, and to buy something from this website you need you have an eBay account. The next gadget helps you to manage your eBay account. The Auction Sidebar Tool for eBay is a free gadget, it is an application certified by eBay and you don’t need an eBay password.

The losing or winning bids are in different colors therefore you can see them at-a-glance. The gadget allows you to place the directly from it, it removes items from the watch list, it can synchronize the time with eBay, if you want to see your feedback score the gadget can display it. It is fully customizable because you have many alert sound and skins to choose from, you can also change the color. You will be able to see the pages detailed with picture gallery and description. The gadget lets you know if an update for it is available and if you have a new eBay message the Auction Sidebar Tool for eBay tells you through a pop-up that appears at the bottom of the screen.

Now playing – With Lyrics is a new Vista Gadget that allows you to view the current playing track from iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, qmp, foobar or Audioscrobbler as text. This gadget shows the album art for the song that is currently played by your chosen media player.  The control option helps you set the volume, set the rating and it has a lot of skins.

If you like to keep a record for your events you might need the Vista gadget zCalendar. You can add your appointments, your notes and if you move the mouse over the dates you can see what you have scheduled for. It is able to alert you if you are in a day when you have appointment or you scheduled something. You can edit or add an event just by clicking on a date. You have the ability to change the color of the numbers, to change the background color or the font type and size. You can make your own configuration to make it more personal.

It you want to know what is going on with your WiFi network or you want to learn more about WiFi connection you can add to your computer the next Vista gadget, Xirrus Wi-Fi Monitor. This gadget will manage and monitor the WiFi network on your Vista system, you can use it to search for others WiFi networks, to locate WiFi devices, to verify WiFi coverage or to learn more about WiFi.

The gadget does all that by using a radar display; the display shows you the available WiFi networks and, also, their range. This product is able to show you details of your Wi-Fi connection such as signal strength, security settings or other network types. You can customize it for your desktop by choosing from 9 different skin types.

There you have some Vista gadgets to make your work at the computer easier, but you have many others to choose from.

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Google Gadgets

Friday, December 4th, 2009 |

Google’s mission is to provide to its users the best search experience on the Internet, giving to the world useful and accessible public information. Google is the developer of the largest search engine in the world. It offers the easiest way to find information on the web and the fastest way to do it. In less than half a second, Google provides relevant information to users around the world. Usually the search engine responds to more than 100 million searches every day.
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The search engine has an innovative search technology based on PageRank. This technology ensures that the most important information or the most important result is displayed first.

Google search engine has a lot of gadgets and in the next lines we will present a few Google gadgets and how they work.

The Gmail gadget: this one is very easy to use; it has a nice blue color. You might have some problems when you get an e-mail in your Gmail account because it doesn’t alert you every time you get one. It allows you to see a preview of your inbox. It allows you to read the entire e-mail, to reply it, to delete it, to view other boxes or to compose.

One of the negative features is not allowing you to attach files and you don’t have a link to launch your Gmail on a browser. It doesn’t remember the username and the password, so every time to reboot or restart your computer you have to enter the password and the username again.

Doesn’t have a mark as “Read” function and you don’t know which e-mail you read and which you didn’t.

Overall it is a good gadget if you want to browse through the e-mails without using the internet browser; you have the access of your e-mail right on your desktop.

Another Google gadget is the Google Docs. It is a nice gadget, you can collapse the gadgets into tabs, but some voices say that it’s to big and the company should made it smaller. To import file on your Google Docs you just have to drag and drop, it’s so easy. It is also a very simple way to back-up your important files and also work online while you do that. One thing you should know is that is doesn’t work for PDF files so you can’t upload files in this format. It doesn’t have the option to create folders for the files you have and if you a lot of them is very hard to find one specific file.

This gadget helps you to keep all your work and information in one centralized place so you always know where to find it.

You might also like Google gadgets calendar. This is a very nice calendar with a clock, but if you don’t like the style or the color orange you can’t change it. In the calendar the week starts with Sunday but this can be a negative aspect for the users from countries where the calendar starts with Monday. If you are from Europe and you like this gadget you should know that you can’t change the date format to European DD/MM.

The default size of this calendar is too small and if you reboot the computer, even it you made it bigger, it appears again on default size and you have to re-adjust it.

Other Google gadget is Media player remote, with this player you can control the music played or the videos played anywhere from your desktop. All you have to do is simply drag and drop the music that you want to hear. If you have some favorite songs in a playlist all you have to do is drag and drop the folder in to the player.

One negative aspect is that it hasn’t the shuffle button, so the player will play the songs in the order.

Next Google gadget in line is Object gadget Calculator. It comes in handy if you to make a quick calculation. You can have it in a standard or simple type or scientific type. It accepts all the basic functions and also keyboard input for numbers. A negative aspect can be the fact that the display is too small and the key symbols are small as well. You can’t copy numbers from the calculator and you can’t paste numbers on the calculator, so it lacks a copy and a paste function.

Google gives you a very cool gadget if you need to look for information on the internet, Wikipedia Search. You can search in this free encyclopedia any kind of information you like, the search is only in English and if you want to choose another language you can’t do that. With this gadget is very easy to find the information you want and you don’t have to go on the internet.

Another Google gadget is OnAir Radio Tunes; it is an online radio stream gadget, it is a little to make it work, but here are some tricks to do it. You open the radio station that you want with the player that you want (for example media player) then you must highlight the station that you want to play with the gadget and chose properties to get the web link. The next step is to copy the link into the gadget using the plus button. Next step for you is to type the name of the radio station in the top field and then use ctrl+shift+V to copy the name in to the bottom field and there you have it.

These are a few Google gadgets for you to work it, there are a lot more and you can find them on Google’s web page. Enjoy!

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Coolest Gadgets

Thursday, November 19th, 2009 |

Ritek, a company that manufactures all type of electronic consumer products, just released a new product named Yego USB Flash Drive that provides 2 additional USB ports that helps the user to connect more devices trough one USB port.
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This cool computer gadget allows password set, to help the user protect his files and prevent authorized access. In this way, the stocked  datas can be accessed only by the ones who know the password and assure the personal intimacy to your files.

The gadget also have a LED light indicator to help the user to see which port is used or   which one is operating. It can be connected to personal computers that use almost any operating system, like Windows Me, 2000, 98 SE or XP, Mac OS X or Linux Kernel.

This USB gadget extract its power from the PC’s port where it is connected. To reduce its power consumption and be eco- friendly, the device have a power save mode implemented as feature.

Its dimensions are small, with only 69 mm length, 43,5 mm width and 14,8 mm depth and weights only 19,5 grams so it can easily be putted to any pocket or to any key ring.

This cool gadget had received a big number of recognitions and awards since it was released, like Taiwan Excellence Award, in 2007, Good Design Product, Product Design Award in 2008, and News Tips Cherry Pick Award. Also, the company which manufactures it, have an entire line of USB memories, apart for it. Ritek produce MMC cards, RS-MMC cards, Compact Flash, SD cards or unbalanced SD cards and other products like CDs and DVDs, recordable CDs and DVDs, OLED  screen displays and plastics.

Sony released their first E-reader. Even if its form it is like a normal book, this cool gadget have an electronic paper developed by the E Ink Corporation. The display have   166  dots per inch density in 5 inch resolution version, 8 levels of gray scales, to improve and adapt the reading by the user’s needs. The PRS-900 model have 16 levels. These dates means that the LCD display can be seen in direct sun light. The E-book don’t require any power to keep a static image.

The user can purchase and download materials from the Sony Connect e-Book  Store  which use an iTunes store as interface. It can display PDFs, ePubs, RSS feeds, JPEGs, BBeBs formats. It can play even MP3s or AAC unencrypted.

The bad part of this hot gadget is that the purchased e-books can be shared only between six devices, but you can register 5 up to 5 readers to one account and share e-books accordingly.

The Sony e-book competes with other names from the industry of e-paper: iRex, iLiad, Amazon Kindle, CyBook.

Since September 2006, there have been released 6 models, starting with the PRS 500. The PRS 700 have a touch screen and was announced at the start of October 2008.  On August 25, 2009, the Reader PRS 900 Daily Edition was announced and featured a 7 inch diagonal and free 3G wireless via AT&T for an easy access of Sony e-Book Store without a personal computer.  It have a 512 MB internal memory but only 380 MB accessible, the others being necessary for the operating system. It have a support for Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo and SDHC.

The rate of the screen it is pretty slow, the page rate being update in 0,5 up to 1 second. That’s why Sony didn’t implemented any sophisticated menu software or scroll for zoomed pages.

From the release of the Sony E-Book Library PC interface, the software was compatible only with the Windows operating system but, on the August 25, 2009, Sony released a Mac OS compatible software , in the same day they announced the PRS  900.

Another bad part of this E-books is that it can’t be configured for the use of another language than English dictionary, this language been set as the default lookup dictionary, in 2 variants: american English version and British English version.  Many users still hope, especially on the international activity market, that they will solve this problem and they will introduce also as dictionaries some foreign languages or that they will let dual-language dictionaries to be set as default.

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