One fun feature of Vista is the Sidebar. It comes equipped with ‘gadgets’, such as a clock, feed headlines, notes and a CPU meter.
If you click the + button at the top of the Sidebar, you open the Gadget Gallery. This shows all the gadgets installed on your computer – but not necessarily those present in the sidebar.
Right-click on one and you’ll find that you can either add it to the Sidebar or uninstall it – remove it from your computer completely.
There’s also nothing to stop you adding more than one copy of a gadget to the Sidebar. For the most part this will be pointless, but you can, for example, have multiple weather gadgets showing the state of different places around the world.
If you click on the ‘Get more gadgets online’ link at the bottom-right of the gallery, your browser will whisk you to the Windows Live Gallery, where you’ll find hundreds more gadgets, encompassing the useful, the useless but fun, and the utterly bizarre.
Useful ones include search tools, text news feeds, share prices, currency converters, and radio and TV stations. Under the heading of useless but fun come a bubble-wrap popper, a voodoo doll to name and stick pins in, that prince of timewasters, sudoku, and dozens of other games and puzzles. And there’s no shortage of the bizarre, including an apple to ‘munch’ and a singing anime character.
Many of these are third party and you are warned that ‘This is a third-party application, and it could access your computer’s files, show you objectionable content, or change its behaviour at any time’. So if you see a BBC News 24 presenter tearing off his clothes and screaming obscenities, don’t say you weren’t warned.
XP users need not feel left out. If you install the latest version of Google Desktop, this doesn’t just give you a search toolbar, but a Google Sidebar, too. Although third-party sidebars are nothing new, the clout of Google means that there are nearly as many gadgets available as there are for Vista.
Personal favourites include a tiny BBC radio, a star map and a virtual pot of tulips that blossom if you ‘water’ them with your mouse. And, of course, sudoku. It’s a wonder sometimes how this column ever gets written.
Like the Vista Sidebar, it’s transparent, and one added extra is that you can save your gadgets (and their options) to a Google account, so you can load them from any PC with an internet connection.
Stuck mail
The artist formerly known as Outlook Express, now relaunched as Windows Mail in
Vista, has had a lot of people baffled with stuck mail items.
Typically, a message gets stuck in the Outbox. It can’t be sent, it can’t be deleted and it prevents all other mail messages from being sent, although incoming mail is received normally.
Other users complain of related problems, such as being unable to clear the Deleted Items folder, which can rapidly fill up with junk mail.
This behaviour is caused by corruption of the mailbox folders and anecdotal evidence suggests that email virus scanners may be responsible.
Microsoft has a Knowledgebase article on the problem (KB941090). This offers several manual methods of fixing the problem, which we won’t reproduce here.
