Best Free Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets

One of those hundred WOW features Microsoft claimed would turn people to Windows Vista is Vista Sidebar present in all six versions of current and most popular operating system. In the past I used to resort to Yahoo widgets simply because of the fact that Vista sidebar did not offer any customizing at all which seems to be traditional approach and philosophy of MS. Despite being so non-customizable there are hundreds of free Windows Vista sidebar gadgets designed to extend usability made by external guys rather than Microsoft itself. Some of them are very well designed and useful and I gathered a few of them which are in my opinion worth keeping.
Although there are more great gadgets for Windows sidebar a lot of them consume unreasonable amount of CPU power so I was forced to exclude them from recommendation.

XDSystemA1 - multi CPU meter, memory consumption, time and system uptime

CPU Gauge 1.0 - CPU digital&analog meter

Top Processes - displays processes which consume most CPU power

zCalendar - highly customizable calendar gadget with sound and alert reminders

Wireless Network - signal strength, network name&network encryption state

Windows Media Player - control music from sidebar

RDSafely - safely remove any removal media from sidebar

Launcher - launch selected application from sidebar

Network Traffic - simply network meter with graph display

Network Meter - displays internet upstream&downstream bandwidth plus accumulated amount of transferred information, external IP, internal IP, network name, IP lookup option, signal strength, wireless connection state

Download best 10 Vista sidebar gadgets from Microsoft gallery

Here are some more Windows sidebar gadgets in case these do not work for you.

Best Free Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets