Microsoft - Found this as a support bash, they don't have time for 7

[DaveLembke]

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/downloads/personalize/gadgets

Because we want to focus on the exciting possibilities of the newest version of Windows, the Windows website no longer hosts the gadget gallery.

Found this page earlier today when performing a fresh Windows 7 install and wanting to add a CPU and Network monitor gadget to the desktop.

I laughed when I read it because gadgets for Windows 7 are not outdated and to be considered legacy. What I saw when I read this was a RUDE STATEMENT OF .... "MOVE TO WINDOWS 8, We don't have the space available to offer 500MB of our web servers massive TB of storage to store and host for free download Gadgets for Windows 7".

Personally I feel that they should have remained hosting the gadgets for download and state that Microsoft is no longer developing and supporting the following list of gadgets. Download and use at own risk confirmation prior to download with reference to potential security vulnerabilities of using these gadgets, and allow the download of gadgets they once had offered here. Make a new page for Windows 8 and offer a link here for Windows 8 gadgets if there are any.

*Fortunately I saved a backup copy of my gadgets in my archive of software on an external drive and was able to find it and install it since they are gone from Microsoft.

I dont believe that these were removed just because of MS Security Advisory (2719662)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/advisory/2719662
because they clearly state" Because we want to focus on the exciting possibilities of the newest version of Windows"

[patio]

That is in fact why MS no longer supports gadgets.

[BC_Programmer]

The only way to "fix" the vulnerability within gadgets would require them to completely rework the entire framework on which they are designed.

Guess where they focussed that rewrite? The new Version of Windows. There isn't much point redoing it for Windows 7 because that means every single existing gadget would need to be rewritten. And since they would have to be rewritten for the win8 equivalent it doesn't make any business sense at all to rework the windows 7 implementation.

[TechnoGeek]

The 'gadgets' were fairly useless anyways. One of the first things I did with Windows 7 was remove the Gadgets feature through Windows Components because it's so bad; actually installing or placing any gadgets at all uses unnecessary amounts of system resources.

If you actually want or think you need a gadget platform use Rainmeter or a similar customization toolkit. If you just want CPU and network meters Process Explorer can be setup with tray icons to report them. Networx is another good network meter that tracks and summarizes usage over long periods of time and can be used to generate usage reports.

Bottom line: Gadgets for Windows 7 were insecure; they didn't want to spend the time rewriting the entire platform, bye bye gadgets. And  I say good riddance too!

[DaveLembke]

If you actually want or think you need a gadget platform use Rainmeter or a similar customization toolkit. If you just want CPU and network meters Process Explorer can be setup with tray icons to report them. Networx is another good network meter that tracks and summarizes usage over long periods of time and can be used to generate usage reports.

Thanks for posting this info... going to check into those. I used Process Explorer years ago, but wasn't aware of the ability to be setup with tray icons to report CPU & Network Meters, so its worth checking into it. Also I was using the network meter to keep an eye on network traffic and usage. So I will be checking into the Networx as well.

Also, as I type this on my Linux Mint 14 system, I find it interesting that their open source Widgets (similar to gadgets don't have the framework flaw in design), and being that its open source it would seem easy to port this to Windows 7 and Vista installation to fix what Microsoft refuses to put effort into fixing and give people this functionality back.

Yes they did tie up a small amount of resources to run, but when run on a system with plenty of processing power to spare, their impact on performance is too minimal to be observed to me. However I was only running 2 gadgets and if you were someone who had to have everything reporting everything and anything etc I can see it being a memory hog etc as well as slowing down an older computer. But on this Pentium 4  2.00Ghz with 1GB Ram running Mint 14, the 2 widgets I have on it don't seem to slow it down any and its surprisingly fast for its age and a modern distro of Linux. I expected this system to be unbearably slow with Mint 14 since its an early Pentium 4 before the better Pentium 4 CPU's with Hyperthreading. If widgets/gadgets were going to show an impact on performance I would expect this system to show that, but it hasn't, so the resources to run them is really quite small; or at least the 2 that I am using are resource sippers.

[BC_Programmer]

Also, as I type this on my Linux Mint 14 system, I find it interesting that their open source Widgets (similar to gadgets don't have the framework flaw in design), and being that its open source it would seem easy to port this to Windows 7 and Vista installation to fix what Microsoft refuses to put effort into fixing and give people this functionality back.

Gnome doesn't have "widgets". there are a variety of similar capabilities exposed via other packages. Screenlets, and GDesklets being two such packages. Plasma-Desktop also runs on Gnome, but has a lot of KDE dependencies.


I'm not really sure what you are driving at here, though. There are already other alternatives, such as the already mentioned Rainmeter, or something like XWidgets, or something like Object Desktop available for Windows. You certainly aren't suggesting they actually integrate a GPL product into Windows, I hope.

The resource usage of Widgets can easily be observed by watching the memory usage of sidebar .exe (on windows) or the appropriate process for your selected Widget Package on Desktop Linux. Windows widget's run through Javascript for which the interpreter is generally a tad on the messy side as far as memory cleanup, and JS isn't particularly well-suited to long-running tasks as a result. A quick look at the Linux Widget's show that they are generally coupled with the Desktop Environment, and seem to only support C or C++; and in some cases things like TCL/TK- as the language for the widgets themselves. Screenlets is probably the best implementation, since it supports Python and HTML/JavaScript/CSS. I couldn't find any documentation on how to create a Widget in any of them, though. It's probably one of those Open Source Projects that pretends the Source code is the documentation or some drivel like that.