Windows Vista brought a great new feature to the desktop: sidebar gadgets, little programs that offer information, entertainment or just plain eye-candy to a dockable bar to the right of the screen. Now Windows 7, Vista’s successor, has improved it even more: doing away with the sidebar, it lets you reorganize you gadgets however you want, in either small “sidebar” size or full size anywhere on your desktop.
The huge problem with gadgets, though, is finding functional, interesting and good looking ones. The official gadget repository, Windows Live Gallery, is not very useful, as the screenshots have a very low resolution and an incorrect aspect ratio, and ratings are usually unrepresentative of a gadget’s quality. However, after navigating a while through the Live Gallery I’ve found very useful and aesthetic gadgets. To celebrate the upcoming version of Windows, here are my seven favorite. Note: These gadgets are also compatible with Vista.