The new sidebar in Windows Vista provides many opportunities to present the user with information. For those of you that like to monitor your system performance, the sidebar is the perfect place to run various performance monitoring gadgets. Windows Vista ships with a simple CPU and Memory usage gadget, however, there are many more gadgets out there that are much more useful and help you monitor almost every aspect of Windows.
1. Wireless Signal and IP Address Gadget
This gadget displays your wireless network information such as it’s status, signal strength and security. This gadget also displays your internal IP and gives you a direct link to your router’s / wireless gateway’s web based control panel.
Monitor the battery level of your laptop with this gadget. This gadget provides a much more accurate level reading than the tiny system tray icon.
Info shown: – Cpu usage % ( 2 cores ) – Ram Usage % – Ram info ( Total, used, left size) – Status bars animated above 90% – 100 Skins + background selection
This gadget allows you to see how much time has passed since you last restarted your computer.
This gadget monitors your PC’s drives and shows you the available space for those you’ve selected
If you have any computer related problem, you can ask it at our Question & Answer portal and our experts will answer your queries.
Some interesting gadgets, many of which I haven’t come across before.
Nice post. Thanks for sharing it. Better if you can monitor website rank, position and uptime in one place!
I really like the “Wireless Signal and IP Address Gadget”. But the link to the live gallery page seems to be broken. Could you please post/email me a link to the gadget (for download), or email me the gadget if you have it ?
Thanks in advance.. 
I found gadgets that do all that and then some on some file sharing sites. Its funny, because I think Microsoft was maybe a little late on the band wagon for once.