Windows 7 - having trouble with gadgets. Very limited.


Recommended Posts

I've just formatted my SSD & i'm putting everything back together. The gadgets selection seems to have changed in the past year. I approach it like i did a year ago:

* Right click desktop

* Select gadgets

* Select get more gadgets online

I'm then greeted with a very sparse list. Last time i checked there were plenty of gadgets, now i'm looking at 31 gadgets., Where did all the others go?

I've got most the ones i had. There's one that was a rectangular big digital clock which i can't find.

Why so limited?

Microsoft recently closed down their main gadget site saying "we're looking towards a better future" or something stupid like that

****ed me right the F off when I found that out when I formated recently

Microsoft recently closed down their main gadget site saying "we're looking towards a better future" or something stupid like that

****ed me right the F off when I found that out when I formated recently

Their own fault, really. It was a neat idea, poorly implemented, and then properly ignored.

Their own fault, really. It was a neat idea, poorly implemented, and then properly ignored.

But why kill the site when Windows 8 isn't even out yet; IMHOP stupid decision.

You just have to search the interwebs to see what you can find or dump the windows gadgets all together and go with Rainmeter or XWidget for your desktop gadgets.

Also take a look at this post, https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1042637-some-really-cool-win7-gadgets-i-found-tonight/page__pid__594491107#entry594491107

Thanks guys, though some of those gadgets i think look terrible. I may just leave it. Can you not download the old gadgets that were available through MS?

Here is a link to all the Windows desktop gadgets.

http://windows.micro...onalize/gadgets

:)

That's exactly the page i get from the method i mentioned in OP

Gadgets were useless. Very few good ones worth using, and most of them had very limited functionality or customizability, so I eventually just gave up on them since they just clutter the desktop.

Rainmeter has been treating me just fine since I started using it past few months and customizability is off the charts with most themes. But this is the exact reason why Metro and Immersive desktop is needed in Win8, to replace gadgets and actually create dashboard for all of it.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Posts

    • Tim Cook: "The US over time began to stop having as many vocational kinds of skills." What's the point of wasting time getting those skills if you can't get a job with them? Good Lord, maybe he and his cohort of CEO's who exported all these jobs to China should just shut the f**k up :D
    • I made a new Cinematic/Trailer for the game, this will be the intro, still a work in progress!  I also updated the Steam page with a ton of new screenshots! 👀 https://store.steampowered.com/app/3925340/Incoherence_Dark_Rooms/  
    • Closed-loop cooling and a custom 800G network protocol let the $7.3B campus run as one AI training machine. Microsoft confirmed June 23, 2026, that its Fairwater campus in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, is fully operational — and the engineering behind it makes the facility something fundamentally different from every data center that came before it. Where conventional cloud infrastructure racks up general-purpose servers and parcels out workloads to each one independently, Fairwater links hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 Blackwell GPUs into a single, coherent cluster using a two-story building design, 800-gigabit-per-second Ethernet fabric, and a proprietary networking protocol co-developed with OpenAI and NVIDIA. The result, according to Microsoft, is the closest thing to a purpose-built AI supercomputer that any company has ever placed in commercial operation. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319205/20260627/microsoft-opens-fairwater-wisconsin-ai-campus-runs-one-supercomputer-via-800g-ethernet.htm  
  • Recent Achievements

    • Conversation Starter
      jessse3334 earned a badge
      Conversation Starter
    • Reacting Well
      JuvenileDelinquent earned a badge
      Reacting Well
    • One Month Later
      Excellence2025 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      Excellence2025 earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Week One Done
      flexorcist earned a badge
      Week One Done
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      501
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      211
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      150
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      73
    5. 5
      macoman
      62
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!