Vista Sidebar

Is there any funny sound generated when your hard drive is in operation? Here I am introducing a free application that can be used to diagnose your hard drive problem.This application allows you to analysis HDD temperature. It also able to conduct S.M.A.R.T test, generate and print report to document for info of the HDD Health. It works on ATA, SATA and SCSI drives. Surprisingly, it also works on removable drives such as USB and Firewire.

Microsoft has extended the control of Windows Media Center in Windows Vista beyond the limits of the operating system to devices adjacent to the platform via Windows SideShow. With the Windows SideShow technology, users are enabled to access information from their Vista machine on a variety of additional hardware from mobile phones to digital picture frames.

This gadget displays videos from the entire MSN Video and Soapbox video catalogs across 30+ countries and languages. Includes ability search and sort by many different view counters. Flyout displays related videos and inline player for Soapbox videos! The gadget automatically updates the content frequently. Includes many settings that can be changed by the user to customize the view to suit their needs. Now you can watch MSN Videos from your Vista desktop.

Today i 've got a player for you. Some may say: "I have already had a Windows Media Player, a Media Player Classic and a powerful Windows Media Center, so i don't need any more." But this one will be a bit different because it is a  Vista Sidebar player and it is powerful enough to play any media file in your computer and internet, on condition that you had a powerful codec package.  In addition, twelve video feeds are built in, CNN, NBC, E-Music .etc are includded. So, you will be able to watch NBC news or listen to E-Music songs even without turning on your TV set. OK, let's see some captures and enjoy.

Brandon Paddock, who works on the Windows Shell Team here at Microsoft, wrote a Windows Sidebar Gadget that displays the status of the Windows Search Indexer. I don't know about you but I think it's kind of neat being able to see how many files Windows Search has indexed on my PC right from my desktop. For folks giving the Windows Search 4.0 Preview a try, you can enable "Index Now" functionality (which is reflected in the above screenshot).

Compared to Windows XP, Windows Vista brings us not only a beautiful user interface, but also a series of convenience.  Windows Sidebar, part of Windows Vista, for example, offers you a lot of gadgets to make your computer life easier and easier.  Besides those ones created by Microsoft , there are still a number of gadgets designed by people all over the world, one of which is this one called Driveinfo, used to check the free space of your drives. What's more,  try to hit one of the drive icons, drive D, for example. What happens? Very convenient, isn't it? In addition, background changing is supported.

Nearly every one who uses computer needs to power off your machine every day and restart it sometimes if there the Windows Update requires, for example.  In Windows Vista, usually, when we shutdown or restart the computer, we need to open the startmenu and click the arrow on the right then press the shutdown or restart button.Perhaps someone says we can create a shortcut of shutdown or restart. But it may be suffering for those who put no icons on desktop. Now there comes an easy way, to use Windows Vista Sidebar gadget.

Are you tired with icons on desktop? Do you want to clean all icons on desktop but worried that it will not be as convenient as before. How to solve this problem? The answer goes toWindows Sidebar. And this gadget may liberate your desktop. How? Let's look at some pictures. You can drop all your desktop icons into the gadget.