Gadgets in Windows 10

[DaveLembke]

Just built my new electron sipper workstation that is using a Biostar A68N-5545 with the A8-5545m 1.7Ghz with 2.7Ghz Turbo ( Mobile APU Processor in a Desktop Mini-ITX Board ), and installed Windows 10 64-bit Home Premium to it, and stuffed it into a recycled DELL Dimension 4600 tower which use to house a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz. Replaced all the IDE drives with SATA, swapped out the old 20-pin power supply with a 24-pin 400 watt, and rewired the front panel LEDS and Soft Power Button to universal so I could connect it to this new board. This board is paired with two DVD-RW drives and a 500GB SATA II Maxtor hard drive that passed as healthy and only has 8700 run hours on it and 529 boots.

Playing around with Windows 10 and wanting to have a way to see resources like I can do with my Windows 7 64-bit system I went on the hunt for a widget or gadget for Windows 10 or some other tool that will show CPU and RAM use.

To my surprise there is a Tool that can be installed to allow for Gadgets to run on Windows 10.

*** Yes there was that Gadget Scare and that's why Microsoft killed them off, but the security vulnerability from what I have read only affects malicious gadgets. I have used the CPU Meter gadget for years and no security issue. So I will continue to use it on my systems. YES you should avoid gadgets, but I'm not scared in using the CPU meter gadget that I have been using for years so I am going to continue to use it.

The Tool adds Gadget support to Windows 8, 8.1, and Windows 10 systems. So I gave it a try and sure enough it works.

The Tool is 8 Gadget Pack. Once installed you can grab the gadget you want and install it and it works.
http://win7gadgets.com/blog/how-install-desktop-gadgets-windows-10/

*** GADGETS SHOULD BE AVOIDED ACCORDING TO MICROSOFT DUE TO SECURITY REASONS ***
Myself, I'm not worried about a single gadget running that I have ran for years and never had any problems.


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[patio]

Nice find...

[tcebob]

I've been using 8 Gadget Pack for years. Favorites: Grass Calendar, Weather, Clipboarder, and even Cooking Timer. If nothing else, get Clipboarder! When you install 8GP you will get a visible sideboard. This can be turned off and you can place the Gadgets anywhere. I find them handy for hiding less used icons.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for the suggestion tcebob.

I use mainly the CPU/RAM gadget in the screenshot that shows values and graphs. Another one I use is a Network one that shows information and upload and download traffic on a graph that will show like the last 2 minutes of traffic.

The network one has been handy in detecting free MMORPG games that I installed that to my surprise turn my system into a seed for others to download game content from through a bit torrent system. I put a stop to this because it was strangling my upload bandwidth and causing problems for other users. Pando Media Booster was uploading content to others and I killed this off to just be a game user and a non-seed member. There are enough people out there oblivious to the fact that their systems are being used this way that they dont need my system also acting as a bit torrent seed. If I didnt have this network log I would probably never have known how they were using my system in a way that I didnt approve of 

The CPU/RAM one I use for when playing games it will log the last 2 minutes of CPU and RAM use and so I can launch a game and play the game through a heavy resource part of the game and then pause the game or exit the game and I can look back and see if its weighing heavy on a single-core or balanced as well as how heavily weighed down was this CPU as well as did my RAM use climb to greater than 90% and how did the Paging react to that to know if i should add more RAM or if its fine to run it as is for whatever I am doing. Additionally if something seems to lag yet the CPU use is only 23%, what gives and I am on the hunt for why something is lagging out such as recently I found that the latest Firefox browser has issues with the game Forge of Empires that seem to build and exiting the browser and launching it again fixes it for a few minutes and then the problem builds again with the game where it lags and becomes unresponsive yet the CPU and RAM are still healthy values. Launching the game on IE the game runs with no problems, so its a bug with the game and Firefox I figure. Without this tool I'd be thinking is the CPU and RAM weighed down heavily to where I need a better CPU system to run it, when its just a browser issue with that flash game yet IE plays it fine.

The clock and weather ones I have used occasionally, but at times I remove them to get rid of clutter on the desktop. I will check into the ones you suggested on this test build of Windows 10 while im still testing it out and not using it for anything risky/confidential like online purchases and e-mail etc

[tcebob]

Nice to hear from you, Dave. Aside from Solitaire I'm not into games, so it's good to find out what others are doing.