Written on March 19, 2010 – 5:54 am | by CoolGadgetConcept |
Windows Vista is a famous operating system produced by the Microsoft company to be used on desktop computers, laptops, tablet PC-s or media center PC-s. It initially had the name “Longhorn” but until its official release the name was changed into Vista. It was officially released for the whole world in January 2007, but it was available for hardware and software manufacturers three months earlier, in November 2006.   It came after five years from the release of its predecessor – Windows XP, and after 2 more years, in 2009 was launched the next operating system from Microsoft – Windows 7.



The Windows Vista operating system came with many new changes and features compared to the Windows XP. And of these new features is the “windows sidebar”. This is a transparent panel anchored to the side of the screen, and where the used can add desktop gadgets. These are small applications designed for a specific purpose (to display the weather, sports score, the time and so on). You can add many gadgets  to your desktop, and you can move them anywhere on the desktop, not just on the sidebar.


So now we’ll discuss about some of these cool Vista sidebar gadgets . If you will visit this link: http://www.thoosje.com/vista-sidebar-gadgets-gallery.html you will see that there are 9 categories of gadgets. And these are: fun & games, IM & spaces, lifestyle, mail & contacts, music, movies & TV, news & feeds, safety & security, search tools, techy, geeky & cool, and tools & utilities.

There are quite a lot of gadgets  in each category, and today we’ll discuss about some of them. In the “fun & games” category you can find many cool gadgets  such as: Asteroids (which is a clone of Atari’s Asteroids game), Digi Watch (which shows a simple but cool LED watch), Feed the snake (which is a version of the famous “snake” game), Greeter gadget (a cool feature that greets the user who is logging in with the sound of a voice), Blackjack (which of course is the Blackjack cards game), Blockade (which is a version of the famous Tetris game), Bricks (which is also another classic and fun game) and many more others.


Now let’s move on to another gadgets  category, for example “Lifestyle”. Here you can find some cool gadgets  such as: the Daily Motivation (which will show you a different word or inspirational message each day, to keep you positive and motivated), the eBay auction watch (which displays auctions from your eBay account. So whenever you are selling a product on eBay, you can use this gadget to always know the bide prices for that product), the Moon Phases gadget (which shows an image of the current Moon phase, the name of the phase and the percentage of full), the eBook world (which shows a top 10 of eBooks). Some other gadgets  from this category are: the Feng Shui gadget (which allows you to bring this concept to your desktop), the Tablet PC inknotes gadget (which allows you to jot down handwritten notes, just like you were writing on a small piece of paper with a pen) or the Impact daily Bible passage (which will show you a passage from the Bible each day). This were about all the gadgets  from this category, and now let’s move on to another one.

In the “music, movies & TV” category you can find gadgets  like: Fresh FM (which will allow you to listen to this internet radio station), Album Art (which shows the album art for the song that you are currently playing),  Billboard Top 10 music (a gadget that shows you the latest top 10 music ranked by Billboard), iSee (which allows you to watch videos from Youtube right on your desktop) and more others. There are also many other gadgets  with radio stations such as: Hindi Radio, AI’s Rock Radio, iClassical Radio, Bay Radio, BBC Radio and more.


In the “feeds & news” category you can find gadgets  like: the Daft.ie Realtime (which gives you the latest updates on the Daft.ie site – the largest property website in Ireland), the AccuWeather.com® Forecast and Radar Gadget (which shows you the weather forecast), the Australian Bushfire Danger (that displays the danger of any bushfires in New South Wales and the Australian Capital territory), the Eye on the web (a gadget that keeps an eye on any webpage you choose), the BBC gadget (which gives you the top 8 BBC headlines), CBC Radio Feeds (that gives you the latest feeds from the CBC radio station), the Globes gadget (that gives you the latest news in business and technology from Israel) and others.

And finally let’s discuss about some fun gadgets  from the “Techy, Geeky & cool” category. Here you can find gadgets  like: the AlerCon (which shows the current AlertCon status at the Internet Security Systems site), the ping gadget (which shows your internet ping), the Countdown timer (which allows you to enter any day from the future and the gadget will show you the countdown until that moment in days, hours, minutes and seconds), the PlayStation 3 European launch countdown gadget (which gives a countdown until the moment of release for the most anticipated games for the Sony Playstation 3 console) or the Twadget (which allows you to keep up with your friends statuses on Twitter, and also post your own statuses).

So as you can see, there are so many cool gadgets  that you can add on your Windows Vista operating system. Just search for them, and whenever you find one that is really cool , tell us all about it!